Middle East: Security

Debate between Tulip Siddiq and Ben Wallace

Tuesday 7th January 2020 Commons Chamber

[Mr Wallace]

My right hon. Friend is right that the defence, security and foreign policy review is the place for us to examine our place in the world and what funding goes behind that.

When it comes to being informed, every single country, including the United Kingdom and the United States, has a category of no foreign eyes—it is “NOFORN” in the United States and “UK eyes only” in the UK. None of us knows what it is like in other countries when they have short notice, potentially, in a case where life is at risk, or how much time they have to action that intelligence or threat and to inform their friends and neighbours. It is a real challenge. In my experience of having intelligence in front of me as a soldier, we did not always have the luxury of time to inform everybody, even within our own system. We should remember that the United States did not inform Congress, let alone its friends and allies, at that particular moment. We do not know the reason that was urgent enough for the United States Administration to do that. It may well have been that a threat to life, dealing with which is paramount, was more important at that particular moment to that particular decision maker than telling us. They did, however, tell us very quickly after the event, and we have engaged with them throughout the process.

[Tulip Siddiq (Hampstead and Kilburn) (Lab)]

When I met the Prime Minister when he was Foreign Secretary, he told me and my constituent Richard Ratcliffe that he would leave no stone unturned to ensure the release of my constituent Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe. I was therefore alarmed to hear the present Foreign Secretary on “The Andrew Marr Show” agree with Andrew Marr that there was nothing that the Government could do to ensure the release of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe. Will the Government leave no stone unturned to ensure that Nazanin comes home, or will British prisoners be left to rot in jail in Iran while the situation between the US and Iran escalates further? Which is it?

[Mr Wallace]

This Government will do everything we can to get released from Iranian prisons not just the hon. Lady’s constituent, but the many other dual nationals currently languishing in those jails. It has been a long-term foreign policy tool of the Iranian Government to incarcerate people that they do not like to intimidate nations. Hostage taking—some of these prisoners are hostages to some extent—has been in the Iranian handbook for many decades. We will do everything we can to try to get her constituent released, and I mean everything. However, everything we do will be within international law. That is our only parameter. We will try and try and try, and the Minister for the Middle East and North Africa continues to do that on an almost daily basis.