All-party Parliamentary Groups

Debate between Peter Bottomley and Alistair Carmichael

Wednesday 19th July 2023 Commons Chamber

[Sir Peter Bottomley (Worthing West) (Con)]

Through you, Madam Deputy Speaker, may I say to the hon. Member for Rhondda (Sir Chris Bryant) that he should use the word “vale” when he says goodbye? For those who were not here earlier, we were having a discussion about how “valet” was spelt and sounded.

I have obviously been remiss in not paying enough attention since the publication of the first report on all-party groups. That concluded that the risk of

“influence by hostile foreign actors through APPGs is real.”

It said that there had been

“a dramatic increase in the number of APPGs”,

commercial interests and the like.

That did not prepare me for the motion, and the conclusions that the Committee came to. The motion contains the words

“subject to any transitional arrangements agreed by the Committee on Standards.”

I had not realised that the Committee would make transitional arrangements without consulting us. I do not believe that I saw draft proposals that alerted me to that. That is my fault. I am not blaming the Committee, but I think that the Chair of the Committee is not right that delaying a vote on this would not allow for improvement; it would.

[Mr Carmichael]

Had I been able to intervene on the Chair of the Committee, I would have said that I agree wholeheartedly with his analysis, and his starting point about the need for reform. I fear that the proposals will result in a variety of unintended consequences coming down the track, but I am prepared to go with them for today if I hear some sort of undertaking, from the Committee or from anywhere else in the House, that there will be a review of them, so that if my fears about unintended consequences prove to be correct we can revisit them, and not just say, “We’ve done that; we’re not going back to it.”

[Sir Peter Bottomley]

We have heard that the Committee could, so to speak, impose the proposals even if the House rejects them. I think that we probably should vote on them, just to ensure that Members who are paying attention have the chance to express their view. I will vote against them on the basis that they should be reviewed.

I am happy to co-operate with the commissioner, the hon. Member for Rhondda, the Committee, the Clerks, the Lord Speaker and the Commons Speaker to help to make the improvements that people desire and that are necessary. Some implications of the proposals are not improvements; they are retrogressive.

Integrated Activity Fund: Transparency

Debate between Peter Bottomley and Alistair Carmichael

Thursday 22nd October 2020 Westminster Hall

[Mr Alistair Carmichael (Orkney and Shetland) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Efford. I remind the Chamber of my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests, as I chair the all-party parliamentary British-Qatar group. I am struggling to remember, but I think I am also an office-bearer for the all-party parliamentary group on Kuwait, but other hon. Members will know that the amount of commitment that those offices bring with them is, shall we say, variable. My engagement with those APPGs has, however, given me, I hope, a small measure of insight into engagement with Gulf countries—those in the Gulf Cooperation Council in particular, although I am not sure that there really is a functioning GCC at present.

I am not without sympathy for the purposes behind the idea of such funds. As I said to the hon. Member for Glasgow East (David Linden), I am not really persuaded that the deficiencies in civic Government, human rights and even in agriculture—rarely does a debate come up where the MP for Orkney and Shetland cannot talk about agriculture—are necessarily down to a lack of funding. However, I am also always aware that when one engages with countries that have deficiencies in those and other areas, it is best always to do so from a starting point of a measure of humility. We rarely achieve much by lecturing and preaching to people in other countries. Understand a bit of their own history and how they have come to the point they are at today.

To draw on my experience with Qatar, for example, I have been genuinely impressed in recent years to see some of the progress that has been made in relation to labour rights. The abolition of the kafala system and the opening of an International Labour Organisation office in Doha are significant achievements, and we should be pleased. When I speak to people in the Qatari Government, of course we want to talk about those things, as they inevitably do—every Government always want to talk about where they have made progress—but we also have to be mindful that there is still a significant way to go in relation to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights, for example. To engage with any measure of integrity with these countries, we have to be able to tell them that, while appreciating the progress they have made, we see other areas where progress still has to be made.

I am always very conscious of the fact that in Britain the abolition of the death penalty and the legalisation of homosexuality both happened in the course of my life. Both date back to the 1960s, so we should engage and encourage, but we should be mindful of the fact that we have not always had the greatest story to tell. On labour rights, for example, let us not kid ourselves, because we still have a problem with human trafficking in this country, notwithstanding the gangmasters legislation that we have now had for about 10 to 15 years. So humility is the order of the day.

That said, engagement must bring with it other things. The most important of those, as the hon. Member for Worthing West (Sir Peter Bottomley) said, should be transparency and accountability. It is in the operation of the IAF that we find a worrying lack of both transparency and accountability, and I fear that permeates other aspects of our engagement with Gulf Cooperation Council countries.

Although it is not necessarily directly on point in relation to the operation of the IAF—at least I suspect that is the case, but who knows?—I am very concerned that the police chief in Dubai appears to be a front-runner for the presidency of Interpol. Nasser Ahmed Al-Raisi was in charge of the police service that detained a British academic, Matthew Hedges, for around six months on trumped-up charges, bluntly, which Matthew has always denied. I understand that he was eventually forced to sign a confession in Arabic, which he just did not understand, and in that time he was tortured. The engagement with the United Arab Emirates in relation to that case, for example, is not one that in any way, shape or form can be seen as working in the interests of United Kingdom citizens.

It is because of the lack of transparency and accountability that the business of engagement with GCC countries looks, from time to time, as if it is operating on double standards. We criticise China—I am 100% behind the Government’s new policy on China—but at the same time we seem to find it very difficult to criticise the Saudi Government, notwithstanding, as the hon. Member for Hammersmith (Andy Slaughter) outlined, their truly appalling human rights record. Yes, they have recently passed legislation allowing women the right to drive, but at the same time they are jailing those who actually campaigned for that very right. They also use the death penalty for people who would have been minors at the time they committed any crimes. They seem to continue on an almost unrestricted basis, including—God help us—having crucifixions.

If UK taxpayers’ money is being spent in such countries, the UK Government have a duty to account to taxpayers for where it is being spent and what it is being spent on. The little that we do know about the operation of the IFA, particularly as it relates to Bahrain, is that it involves sentencing reform and alternative sentencing there. That is a cause that I am prepared to support—indeed, it is a drum that I have beaten for many years in this country. That is certainly something we should support. However, if we consider the way in which alternative sentencing policy is pursued in Bahrain, we find very quickly that in fact there is no benefit for the political prisoners there. The beneficiaries of alternative sentencing are all within the country’s criminal justice system. I would have thought that one of the things we would want to promote is equal treatment, at the very least, of criminal prisoners and political prisoners. We should of course be pursuing a situation in which there are no political prisoners, but for those who find themselves imprisoned in Bahrain, any advances should be equally available to all.

There is a case for doing at least some of the work associated with the IAF, but I cannot think of many areas of public expenditure, even at this scale, that are allowed to be maintained in such conditions of secrecy. It is totally lacking in transparency and accountability. If the money is genuinely being spent on capacity building, we should expect it to be spent through non-governmental organisations, which I know is not easy in Gulf countries. However, they are there and they do operate, and they would seem a more obvious route for channelling support through, as we do in virtually every other theatre in which we spend overseas development moneys.

[Sir Peter Bottomley]

This fund is not part of our aid budget; it is overseas spending.

[Mr Carmichael]

Indeed, which is why I deliberately did not use the terms “overseas aid” or “overseas development assistance”. However, to the hard-pressed British taxpayer, it is money that is being spent overseas, and the objectives set for the IAF would not look out of place in our overseas development assistance budget. If the objectives are the same, there would have to be some compelling reason why, on this occasion, we are effectively giving money to state actors, rather than non-state actors.

I look forward to hearing what the Minister has to say in this regard. I fear that it is a topic to which the House will continue to return for some time to come.