Withdrawal from Afghanistan: Joint Committee

Tom Tugendhat Excerpts

Wednesday 15th September 2021 Commons Chamber

[Tom Tugendhat (Tonbridge and Malling) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure to follow several hon. and right hon. Friends. I find myself in the unusual position of disagreeing with the Opposition and agreeing with those on the Government Benches, which, as many Members will know, has a touch of novelty for me. I think I have been doing my best to hold this Government to account on matters of foreign affairs, but Members might feel that I have not been quite as rigorous on this matter as I should have been today. Could I ask you, Mr Deputy Speaker, to check whether the phone signal is working properly in the Chamber? My phone seems remarkably unable to ring.

[Carol Monaghan]

I wonder whether the hon. Gentleman would share his contact list with me, because he seems to be able to contact the Home Secretary directly while many of us cannot. We have similar cases to his, and I congratulate him on having success with his case, but it might be helpful if he could do that.

[Tom Tugendhat]

I would be absolutely delighted to. As many Members of the House will know, I share any Member’s phone number with other Members once I have got their permission to do so, and if the hon. Lady would like to ask me, I would be very happy to do exactly that.

I share much of the criticism that I have heard from various Members about how the relief and evacuation operations have been handled. I have been pretty critical of the ways in which questions have been answered and co-ordination has been conducted. I think I have also been pretty robust in expressing how that should be improved.

[Hannah Bardell (Livingston) (SNP)]

On the matter of responses, I wrote to the hon. Gentleman’s colleagues in the Government about a friend of mine and a group who were trapped in Afghanistan. The friend of mine, who I worked with 10 years ago at the US Department of State, was an adviser to the Afghan Government. Not only had he fled Afghanistan with his family and gone to Turkey because he saw the writing on the wall, unlike our security services, but he had key expertise to offer. Yet I was not even able to get a response from the Government to acknowledge the name of my friend and the group of human rights defenders. I got a standard response. Luckily my friend has been given passage to the US, but is it not a disgrace that the hon. Gentleman’s Government will not even acknowledge the individual cases and lives that we are raising with them?

--- Later in debate ---

[Tom Tugendhat]

The hon. Lady will know that, in all manner of ways, I support this Government, but on this single issue of foreign affairs it is my job to criticise and attack the Government where I feel they are lacking, and I have done so. I will not add to her comments. She has made her point extremely powerfully.

I was pretty clear with the last Foreign Secretary that this is a problem that needs addressing, and needs addressing now. The Foreign Affairs Committee has been pretty robust. The hon. Member for Glasgow South (Stewart Malcolm McDonald) does not know this yet, but I have just written to the new Foreign Secretary asking for a list of all phone calls. I am sure that the Under-Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs, my hon. Friend the Member for Rochford and Southend East (James Duddridge), will be giving us the information for which we ask. We have asked for the contacts between the Government and other people, and for any number of documents, in order to conduct the inquiry. The hon. Member for Glasgow South will be sitting on the Committee and scrutinising those documents.

The Foreign Affairs Committee appreciates the urgency of which the hon. Member for Livingston (Hannah Bardell) speaks. We appreciate the troubles that many people around the world are facing by not having contact with family and not being able to get family out of Afghanistan. We appreciate the real challenges due to the abject failure and defeat we have seen in Afghanistan. That is why, bizarrely, I find myself on the other side of this argument. The Foreign Affairs Committee is literally doing the job that the Opposition are asking us to do. We started even before Parliament returned with a hearing with the then Foreign Secretary, who I do not think felt that it was a particularly easy ride. I certainly do not think the hon. Member for Glasgow South gave him a particularly easy ride. The Committee has been working as one to interrogate the Department very robustly, which is exactly what Select Committees need to do.

The truth is that the hon. Member for Wigan (Lisa Nandy) has a point. Not unusually, she has got the core of the matter right, which is that we need a much more strategic approach to foreign policy. We need an all-encompassing approach to how we scrutinise it, and we need a much more integrated approach to how Britain approaches the world.

I would like to see the new Foreign Secretary taking on the mantle of overseeing Britain’s foreign strategy in a global sense. I would like to see her speaking about not just foreign policy but also trade policy, defence policy, education policy and justice policy as they affect Britain abroad. Unless there is a Department bringing together Britain’s foreign policy, and unless there is a strategic approach to the kind of integration and interaction we are going to have with other countries, we will find ourselves constantly salami-sliced.

I would like to see that, and obviously I would like to see a supercharged Foreign Affairs Committee scrutinising it, but what I would really like right now is for us not to mess around with the structures of the House but to get on with allowing the Committees that have already started the work to deliver as quickly as possible. Then, if we cannot get the answers, we need to look at a judge-led inquiry, not just another super Committee.