Sir Iain Duncan Smith
MP for Chingford and Woodford Green · Conservative · United Kingdom
“I raise the cases of Ryan Cornelius and Jimmy Lai—both United Kingdom citizens—to the attention of the Foreign Secretary, who I welcome to his position. Ryan Cornelius has been incarcerated for 19 years—trumped-up charges by a corrupt regime that is supporting a war in Sudan at the moment.”
“Has the Secretary of State been made aware of the case of Joshua Wong, a Hong Kong resident who is being prosecuted by the Administration in Hong Kong using the national security law?”
“A particular memory is that during the Maastricht debates, when, I have to confess, I and one or two others here were deeply rebellious, Ann lectured me from the Dispatch Box—she was in government—about how I should support the Maastricht treaty and the European Union, which rather worried me.”
“It was phenomenal, because she was so certain about the way that she was. Ann embodied something else: the passion that is necessary for us in this Chamber to make our arguments without the fear of any other person doing something to us.”
“We need to reiterate, and the Government and the Home Secretary need to specify, to all the social media companies that they must do something to close down the visceral, violent language that some people use in attacking others personally, as they did over Ann’s murder, which shocked me.”
“Friday was a funny day. I heard the news very early in the morning that Ann had died, and I was utterly surprised about that because she had seemed perfectly fit the last time I saw her, so I gave my condolences and spoke about it on the radio.”
The complete record
Every one of 4,453 lines we hold for Sir Iain Duncan Smith, in date order, each linked to its source. Free to read, in full, without an account. Page 41 of 90.
“Last week started with an exposé from the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China regarding the involvement of Chinese officials and Government in the Uyghur suppression, sterilisation and forced encampment, and it ended with their involvement in the stripping away of the rights and freedoms of the people in Hong Kong, all the way up to the top. I do not expect my right hon. Friend to answer specifically, but I ask him a simple question. Given the announcement in the papers today, many in Hong Kong have said that it should go to whatever highest level the evidence takes it. Would he be prepared, therefore, to follow through with the measures no matter who the individuals are, no matter how high they go, and even if it meant starting with Carrie Lam, whose family, I understand, have the privilege of British passports?”
“I unreservedly congratulate my right hon. Friend. As my hon. Friend the Member for Tonbridge and Malling (Tom Tugendhat) and others have said, he has personally been an advocate of this for some considerable time, so he will have the right to satisfaction on that. I also commend him for naming all those to do with the Magnitsky case and in Saudi Arabia. Following the question from my hon. Friend the Member for Tonbridge and Malling, I again raise the issue of China, because this is where big business will start to lean on the Government quite hard.”
“We learned a lesson 80 years ago about the appeasement of dictators. Maybe it should be applied today.”
“I commend my right hon. Friend for his statement and clear leadership here and in the UN and for the Magnitsky arrangements he intends to bring forward. I remind him and others that China thinks that Hong Kong is collateral damage, which it can happily sweep to one side. The truth is that China sees itself as engaged in an ideological battle about how Governments should be formed, and it dismisses the rules-based order of the west. The Chinese have made that very clear, and they have a strategic view on it. So does my right hon. Friend agree that it is time for us to bring the free world together, not just to complain or to get rapporteurs, but to hit China in the one place it worries about—its economy? We have run to China to buy goods and to invest; it is time we reviewed every single programme here in the UK and around the free world.”
“The hon. Lady talked about the Morse review. We called for a review before the present Prime Minister was brought in; he agreed to it. The Morse review does not completely cover everything. I have certainly said to my constituents, as I suspect most of us have, that the Government were bound to implement its findings, even if we think the findings could have gone further—but the Government have not done that. That shows a lot of bad faith on their part.”
“My right hon. Friend talks about tax loopholes and, yes, that is absolutely clear, but the thing about the loan charge is that HMRC itself was complicit in the process. It was advising and letting people believe that those charges were quite safe and reasonable. Then quietly, it came to the conclusion that they were not and did not make it clear to anybody. In effect, therefore, it is HMRC that has created the tax loophole and then failed to identify it and tell people that they were on the wrong scheme.”
“(Urgent Question): To ask the Prime Minister whether his Government will make a statement on the mistreatment by the Chinese Government of Uyghurs in Xinjiang province.”
“Furthermore, given the Chinese Government’s appalling record on human rights, their attack on freedoms in Hong Kong, their bullying behaviour in border disputes from the South China seas to India, their blatant breaching of the rules-based order governing the free market and their delayed declaration on covid-19, will the Government now initiate an internal review of the UK’s dependence on China, with a view to significantly reducing that dependence, and call on the free world to come together to ensure that this growing threat from China is dealt with together before, as history teaches us, it is too late?”
“Friend at least get the UK to make its own legal determination after weighing up this new evidence? Of course the world wants to deal with China, but we cannot continue with business as usual while this sort of blatant activity continues.”
“Mr Zenz’s paper concludes that these measures are part of a state-wide crackdown that includes the mass sterilisation of women. This report corroborates the many horrific personal testimonies that many of us have heard. The genocide convention maintains that birth prevention targeted at minority groups is indicative of genocide, and the convention binds individual states to act, not just to rely on the international judicial system. Does my hon. Friend therefore agree that the Uyghur people have been, and are, the victims of mass atrocity crimes? I ask the Foreign Secretary to go to the UN and call for an independent inquiry, but, sadly, I also recognise that the ways to deal with this through the UN will almost certainly be blocked by China. Given that likelihood, will my hon.”
“The Inter-parliamentary Alliance on China—IPAC—which is made up of 30 other lawmakers from 16 global legislatures, has today published research by Professor Adrian Zenz, the world’s leading expert on the treatment of minorities in Xinjiang province. The report shows that birth rates in the two mostly Uyghur regions plummeted by more than 60% from 2015 to 2018. Across the Xinjiang region, birth rates fell by nearly 24% in a single year, compared with just 4.2% nationwide. Worse, it is now clear that this is a direct result of Government actions. Unearthed Government documents mandate that birth control violations that come about “due to the influence of extreme religious thinking” should be “dealt with severely”, and that those unable to pay fines should be “dealt with through coercive measures”, including internment.”
“It could be six weeks before we discover the outcome of a review, but I do not believe that a single fact is going to change in that six weeks. The reality is that the advisers are all divided; the Government must make a decision and get this one right.”
“I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Tunbridge Wells (Greg Clark) on securing this urgent question, because this is the most important and significant strategic decision the Government are going to have to make as they unlock the economy. The problem is that so much of this debate has been shaped around the idea of the economy as an economic tool, but it is not just economic. The reality is that, with our focus on covid, we are in danger of losing sight of what will happen, probably to the poorest in society, if people start to fall unemployed and suffer depression and increased illness. This will have a major effect on the ability of people to manage their lives. So this is not just economic.”
“Also, will he now work with all our allies around the world to get them to give all Hong Kong passport holders right of abode, if necessary?”
“I congratulate my right hon. Friend on his statement, but does he not now think that the position of China is altogether too obvious, and that since President Xi arrived, its ambitions globally, both militarily and economically, are now fully on track and Hong Kong is but one manifestation of its global reach through the South China sea, through its abuse of human rights and through its ambitions over Taiwan? Is this not the case, as a previous Prime Minister once said, that this is “only the first sip…of a bitter cup”, and that it is going to be offered to us again and again? Appeasement, which has been the case for the free world, is now no longer an option, so will my right hon. Friend now explain how he intends to organise the free world so that we stand up against this?”
“Ours is the only country that has a 2-metre rule—Germany’s rule is 1.5 metres, some countries use 1 metre and the World Health Organisation says that 1 metre is enough. Such an approach would help enormously with public transport—on the tube and so on—where there is a great problem. I urge the Government to get on with opening the economy and with giving people the opportunity to get back to their livelihoods. We should trust them, with their common sense, to be able to implement these sets of guidance and to make sure they do the right thing as they go back to work.”
“It is a puzzle why it was not right at the beginning but it is now right as we try to open the economy. I am particularly concerned about that. I just want to say to the Government that for four weeks I have been arguing that they need to open the economy and be talking to the public to bring them with them and give them a sense of what is coming. The paper produced yesterday and the statements that have been made at last are the right indication. I am with the Government: people should use their common sense. There are going to be areas and times when we cannot always meet that argument and that deal about social distancing. I want to ask one question: why does every other country have a lesser distance than we do? That makes a big difference on things such as public transport.”
“Another point to make is about testing, where the Government have had to shoulder a lot of difficulty and blame, but quite a lot of that should also be targeted, in due course, at Public Health England. The big mistake they made early on was the decision not just on having more testing, which they should have done from day one, but the decision not to include all the private laboratories. They should have done that straight away; even though they were building their own and getting their own, we should have maximised and gone out to the private laboratories, which would have helped enormously. The other thing I do not understand at the moment is that at the beginning of lockdown we did not close the airports but now we are looking to make coming into the airports more difficult as we come out of lockdown.”
“My concern is that we seem to have been wedded in the early days to the Imperial College model, which has had some quite significant criticisms and a poor record in the past of forecasting in these areas. I am glad that the Government have now widened this out. I note that Sweden ran the figures on the Imperial model and found that it was wrong by about 15 times, overestimating the number of deaths as against what they had witnessed—the same applies in respect of what Edinburgh University and others had managed to do. I am therefore concerned that there is a deal of pressure on that, but I am also glad the Government have moved on from there.”
“The work they have done so far has been remarkable, and they have rightly received the full support of people in this House and, I believe, in the country at large, but I wish briefly to raise some issues with them. They say they have been guided by the science, but a number of people have concerns that this is not just about the science alone; there needs to be a much broader sense of where we are—the balance between the economy and covid. Some of the language has been loose on that, with the idea that it has been a choice—this is a false choice—between saving lives and saving the economy. Both are about saving lives; the point is when one becomes so big that we need to deal with it. I think we are at that moment now, and have been for a little while, in terms of the economy.”
“I wish to make a few quick points. First, I wish to welcome the Chancellor’s statement today, because this is an area where a lot of us have been pushing him to give some security to businesses as they go forward. The idea of the furloughing scheme going on and, we hope, reducing as it does, as businesses go back to work, is an important one. However, we must bear in mind that there is a huge cost to it, at some £13 billion every month. He is right to say that he is prepared to extend the scheme, but we must be careful that we do not end up spending so much money that it makes it difficult for the economy to thrive. I also wish to raise with the Government a few areas where I have concerns.”
“They can be delivered within days by a Department that already has the ability to do that while he gets on with the other facilities.”
“I commend my hon. Friend and I agree with him—that is something that the Government should be moving on now, but there is something else the Government could do literally today. Universal credit has three basic levers that can all be pulled now enormously to help people who are in work. First, the taper could be lowered dramatically at this stage, which would push the floor right up underneath people in work at the moment, allowing them to fall back on that if employers cannot deal with them. Secondly, Ministers could change benefit rates, allowing a greater expanse of money to flow to claimants: that could be done today. The third area where my hon. Friend could act is to look at the waiting time and reduce that almost immediately. Those three things were always built into the system for flexibility and they can be done today.”
“The Centre for Social Justice has done some quick work on this and come to the conclusion that the smallest elements of the voluntary sector, which have no reserves, are going to lose about £400 million during this next few months, and they are going to be the ones that are called upon most for support in the community for those who suffer. Can I please ask him to look at this very carefully and see what we can do to give them that cash aid?”
“I commend my right hon. Friend the Chancellor for his bold measures today, which will encourage many small businesses to believe that the Government are on their side. There is more to do, I know. Can I also encourage him, though, in his statement to come, on further employment measures to bear it in mind that the most important thing we can do is to do everything we can to keep people in employment? That will help to deliver growth. One area I want to raise with my right hon. Friend, which has not really been touched on, although I think the shadow Chancellor raised it, is the voluntary sector.”
“It is often bandied around, including by some of the security guys the other day, that this is somehow all to do with market failure, as if out of nowhere companies from the west in the free markets—the free world—no longer wanted to get involved in this process. That is completely and utterly without foundation. The single biggest problem we have faced is that, nearly two decades ago, the Chinese Government set out to ensure that they dominated the market. As this organisation has access to nigh-on unlimited funds, it has spent that period underbidding every single time in these processes, from 2G through to 4G and now, as we understand it, 5G.”
“I rise to speak to amendment 1, standing in my name and in those of my colleagues. The reason we have tabled this amendment is that we are genuinely concerned, like the hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne Central (Chi Onwurah), that this country has got itself far too bound into a process in which we are reliant on untrusted vendors—in this particular case, Huawei. We recently heard a Government Minister express the view that Huawei is a private company. Let us be absolutely clear at the outset: this company is not a private company. Ultimately, it is essentially almost completely owned by Chinese trade unions, and they, of course, are completely locked into the Chinese Government. This an organisation wholly owned by China.”
“What it does have, however, is money, which allows it to bid down. The hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne Central said that she is a believer in free markets. She will know that the free market relies on companies being able, when they sell their goods, to make enough money to reinvest and improve the quality of their goods. That is how a proper rules-based market works, but not with a company like this, which is able to strip that away. One by one, these companies have gone, not because of market failure but because it has been a policy position of the Chinese Government using Huawei to dominate this market over nearly two decades.”
“I agree with my right hon. Friend, and I was going to come to those points. As I saying, if we look at this strategy, we see that when this all began, there were something like 12 companies in this marketplace. One by one, they have disappeared. Why have they disappeared? They simply cannot compete with Huawei’s pricing. These telecoms companies—telcos, as we call them—have bit by bit found themselves going to the cheapest bidder, providing the technology is as good as the others. By the way, it is certainly not an argument that Huawei has better technology; there is no evidence of that whatsoever. In fact, I think Dr Ian Levy said a year ago that he thought Huawei’s security issues were a shambles, and that is correct. Huawei does not somehow have extra brilliant technology.”
“With respect to the hon. Gentleman, I have no idea what he was intervening over. There is a free market, and when a free market operates we have competition because companies are set up to solve problems and sell their goods. When a company has unlimited funds and can undercut the others, there is no money for them, they cannot operate and they will go out of business. It is fairly logical for anybody who understands the free market.”
“My right hon. Friend is absolutely right. I was going to come to that, but now that he has mentioned it, let us kill this one completely. The reality is that there has been a whole series of attempts—successful ones—to steal technology from other companies in the field, thus driving them out, by finding the edge they have on technology and selling it at a cheaper price. The bidding that took place under the previous Labour Government was raised earlier. I am not blaming the Labour Government for that; that just happens to be the way it was. But the amount paid by those companies was astonishing—about £24 billion to £25 billion—and it left them bereft of cash and desperate for cheap product.”
“I am always flexible on the date, providing there is an intent and commitment to eradicate the involvement of high-risk vendors in our system across the board, full stop. I think that is a reasonable position, and I will wait to hear what the Government have to say; they will expect me to intervene to ensure that that is as clear as possible.”
“Despite all the talk about how it can control things, it is quite clear in paragraph 5.5.2 on page 13 when it says: “Without government intervention, the NCSC considers there to be a realistic likelihood that due to commercial factors the UK would become ‘nationally dependent’ on Huawei within three years.” I say to my right hon. Friend the Member for Elmet and Rothwell (Alec Shelbrooke): I put down a date two years from now in my amendment, but the NCSC refers to three years. I want to know what the Government think the risk is and how they will eradicate that.”
“I agree with my hon. Friend. This is the other sad part of what has been going on for over a decade. We have watched quietly—it does not matter which party has been in power—as all that ability has been stripped out of the UK. Our last provider was some years ago, and it has gone, so we now rely on the Huaweis of this world. Furthermore, all the microprocessors and the chips are not produced here; they are mostly produced in the far east. My point is simple: if this was of strategic importance to us, surely we should have all got together and decided that we need to have these facilities here, so that we can control future development. The National Cyber Security Centre has produced its security analysis for the UK telecoms sector.”
“We have looked at the past, we are where we are and now we look to the future. That suggests that we will become completely and utterly in thrall to providers that we cannot possibly trust. That is a big security risk, and it is a statement of absence of thought by any Government. If defence of the realm is our No. 1 priority, this becomes demi-defence of the realm, and I am simply not prepared to put up with that.”
“In fact, Samsung has been involved in the South Korean 5G network anyway, and every one of them says, “We can do this.” The question then is that this will add cost, but I am sorry to say that, in reality, when it comes to security versus cost, my view is that security wins every single time.”
“I am glad that my right hon. Friend raises that point, which I was going to come to. He is right. There has been a whispered suggestion to many of my colleagues and, I am sure, others—I do not mean that anyone has set out with malicious intent, but with practical intent, I suspect, to head off any would-be vote in the wrong direction—that we have to use Huawei because there is no other way of doing this, but that is simply untrue. Yes, there were 12 companies once upon a time and they are much reduced in number now, but I am aware of at least three that have been involved in 5G development or are capable of doing 5G development in what I call the free market world, with all of us, and they are Nokia, Ericsson and Samsung.”
“In fact, at a briefing the other day, I saw them trashing the Australian view of this. I simply say, fine, but the reality is that we are alone on this matter, and I think that that is a very bad place to be in relation to our closest allies when it comes to security.”
“The point is that when people say that smugly, the answer is, “No, we’re not.” The Australians are adamant that they do not believe it is possible to manage this process, and everyone else from the Americans onwards says the same. The Japanese are absolutely seething with us over this because it undermines them, and they are of course very close to what they consider to be a threat. Then we get others, people whom we are not necessarily close to, such as the Vietnamese, who do not even want to do this because they recognise that there is a real threat. My point is that, once we add this all up, there is simply nobody out there who agrees. I therefore very simply say this: no matter how intelligent, brilliant and great our security and cyber-security services are, how is it that they are right and everybody else is wrong?”
“I will give way in a second, but I am conscious that you want me to make some progress, Madam Deputy Speaker. I worry when we start compromising security. I worry—and this is the point I want to make—that we have no friends out there any more on this issue. The Canadians, the Americans, the Australians and the New Zealanders all disagree with us. I know there is sometimes a habit in this country of people quietly and smugly saying, “Well, we’re better than they are”, and I understand that. It may be the suggestion of the Security Council— [ Interruption. ] Well, you know what it is like. I learn a lot from my nationalist colleagues. [ Interruption. ] I do; I used to live there.”
“You don’t even begin to know half of what they know, so now we’ll just sell our goods over here.” The eventual aim of this is to capture most of these networks, and when it has done that, as the National Cyber Security Centre peculiarly said, we may be completely in hock to it because all the other companies will have fallen away, and we will be left with the invidious choice of not doing 6G because we cannot risk it and do not have anybody else to go to. Now is the time to restore our faith in those companies, and give them a chance to compete and to produce the product. They are less risky—I accept there are always risks, but they are far less risky—than the high-risk vendors.”
“You know what, I think that is almost the most powerful point. We have a leadership role in this, and many countries look to us. The reason why it is so important, I believe, that Huawei captures this market is very simply that it knows it will be able to go around to all these other countries that have lesser security than us and say, “Well, you know, the British have got a brilliant reputation, and they’ve said it’s okay, therefore what are you worried about?”
“Friend, his colleagues and anybody else from the Government who is watching—I genuinely understand the difficulties they are in—to please stop lecturing us and saying that there is no other provider and to stop lecturing us about this somehow killing broadband roll-out—it does not. Most importantly, they must remember that the security of the realm is the No. 1 priority, and that is why I have tabled the amendment.”
“It is absolutely critical for me—I will make my mind up on this only when I have heard the words of the Secretary of State—and we need to know, that it is the Government’s intention to rid ourselves of high-risk vendors such as Huawei; that it is the Government’s intention to do that in the Bill that will come before us; that they will now work aggressively and at speed with our Five Eyes colleagues, inviting them in immediately to create, with all of us, a system that allows us to do that at the earliest opportunity; and that they will commence the absolute beginnings of that retraction before the end of this Parliament. I give way a little bit on those timescales, but I think I am being fairly reasonable. It is not normally given to me to make any demands, and I am not doing so. I am simply urging my right hon.”
“Lastly, if the Government do not want us to try to create trouble on this Bill, they must give an absolutely lock-tight commitment that the Bill relevant to this will return before the summer—categorically before that, and an early as possible, perhaps in May—so that we can properly see these commitments plus others written into that Bill, and we can understand that those are the Government’s intentions.”
“I accept that the Government have already said they want to do it with their Five Eyes colleagues—that is a start, because they have not said that before—but we need to work with our real allies to get ourselves into the position where we can actually go on to rid ourselves of these high-risk vendors. I accept that that is not without difficulty, so the Government need to make that pledge very clearly, and they need to give the timescale by which they will have achieved it and commenced the process of winding out those high-risk vendors.”
“I recognise that, strictly speaking, this is not the correct Bill to try to force through the whole change, but my view is any port in a storm. This amendment is a boat in a different port, but perhaps if he so wants, we can move it into the correct port when he brings through the relevant Bill. I need some absolute clarity from the Secretary of State, as I think do my colleagues. First, we must plan and we need to know that it is the Government’s intention to move to essentially rid ourselves of high-risk vendors from our system. There also needs to be a concept of timescale in this. I want the Government to recognise and to accept that we have to set ourselves the task to do this.”
“My right hon. Friend is correct. I will quote what happened in the debate we held in Westminster Hall, because we heard a really significant final statement. The Under-Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, my hon. Friend the hon. Member for Boston and Skegness (Matt Warman) said—quite rightly, by the way, as I think this is a very good starting point—that “we will work to move towards no involvement of high-risk vendors.” —[ Official Report, 4 March 2020; Vol. 672, c. 299WH.] I want to conclude—and allow others to get into this debate—by simply saying that three things need to happen today. I recognise fully, and I say this to the Secretary of State, having done much the same kind of stuff as him, that it is not easy.”
“I am grateful to my right hon. Friend. Let me bring him back to the Government’s position. Is it correct, and does he agree, that the position of Her Majesty’s Government is now to move towards no involvement—I repeat: no involvement—of high-risk vendors in our system and that that, in the five-year period that he is talking about, will be the purpose of what they engage in?”
“I am trying to help my right hon. Friend, believe it or not. I understood from the discussions that our position was clear. I accept that the engagement of the Five Eyes is a new position. I congratulate them on that. But critical to that is that the point of our engagement will start with, as the Under-Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, my hon. Friend the Member for Boston and Skegness (Matt Warman), said, moving towards no involvement of high-risk vendors. If we start by having diversification, we have no position for our Five Eyes partners. But if our purpose is to get this right for no involvement, I want the Secretary of State to say that now. If I do not get that—others can do as they like here—it will be my purpose to press the amendment to a vote.”