David Davis
MP for Goole and Pocklington · Conservative · United Kingdom
“On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. May I start by congratulating my right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest West (Sir Desmond Swayne) on putting a Bill in front of the House that has support from literally everybody in the Chamber?”
“The Post Office Horizon scandal highlighted the institutional instinct to find a convenient scapegoat. Innocent people paid the price, while the institution sought to protect itself. If the Thirlwall inquiry asks too narrow a set of questions, systemic NHS failures will go unexamined.”
“Last month’s sentencing of Nicola Sturgeon’s husband exposed the real reasons behind the Scottish Government’s persecution of Alex Salmond. From 2010 to 2022, Peter Murrell abused his position to embezzle almost £500,000 from the SNP to buy luxury items. He used SNP money to buy a £33,000 Volkswagen Golf.”
“The consultants also reported that in the two months since the change infants have been sick but recovered as expected.” The report highlighted deficiencies in staffing levels, leadership and communication, but, in the trial, it was not shown to the jury—they knew nothing of it.”
“One of the nurses let go later described it as “the decimation of the Nursing and Midwifery service”, adding that “eight registered nurses...were replaced with nursery nurses...unqualified staff are replacing qualified staff”.”
“There was little space, cots and incubators were stored in corridors, and mothers struggled to find somewhere to breastfeed their babies. Susan Gilby, the hospital’s chief executive between 2018 and 2022, later described the unit as “dark, dingy and cramped”, providing a “less than ideal” environment to work in.”
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“The right hon. Gentleman is exactly right. We will come to a number of circumstances in which information was available and should have been, but was not, acted upon. This was not as hard as some may try to portray it as being: after all, the appointment did not come as a surprise. Lord Mandelson himself was clearly campaigning to become the ambassador after failing to win the chancellorship of Oxford University. Indeed, someone told me that he was actually campaigning for the ambassadorship while also campaigning for the chancellorship, so he was after two jobs, not one. It was clear at an early stage that he was going to attempt to do this, and there was widespread discussion at the time about his suitability for the role, so there was plenty of time for a preliminary investigative or vetting process.”
“He saw nothing wrong with such apparently compromising behaviour, and in that category, indeed rather at the top of it, was his association with the Russian oligarch and gangster capitalist Oleg Deripaska. Let us be clear who we are talking about here, because most Members probably do not know much about him. Mr Deripaska was the winner of the battle for control of the Russian aluminium industry, a battle in which roughly 100 people were murdered. In court reports, Interpol documents and American Government publications, Deripaska has faced serious allegations of murder, bribery, extortion, and involvement in organised crime. This is a truly bad man.”
“I am very glad to say that I am not the Prime Minister’s speechwriter, but all I can say to the hon. Gentleman is that I hope the issue does not come up, because it would undoubtedly be embarrassing and diplomatically problematic for the Prime Minister. Astonishingly, after being sacked twice for misdemeanours, in 2004 Lord Mandelson was appointed by Tony Blair to be the European trade commissioner. He was, as it were, given a third chance. As the trade commissioner, he was criticised on numerous occasions for accepting lavish hospitality from companies on whose commercial interests he was in the process of ruling—whether the company concerned was Microsoft, an Italian shoe producer or whatever—which, for some reason, often involved free luxury cruises.”
“The Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China presented a dossier to US Senators, which provoked enough concern that they passed it to the FBI. This may have been a reason—and here I am surmising—for the purported concerns about whether the Trump Administration would allow Mandelson’s accreditation back in January.”
“I do not have documentary records on this, so I am not going to name the companies I am talking about, but there are Russian companies—extremely dubious Russian companies—and Chinese companies. I am looking at my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith), who would recognise a number of the Chinese companies because he has campaigned about them, but I will leave it there. In the context of Lord Mandelson’s appointment to Washington—and bear in mind that this is all to do with a judgment made about his being the ambassador in Washington—it is his close association with the organs of the Chinese state that should have raised most red flags, if the House will forgive the pun.”
“In 2008 Mandelson was, very controversially, raised to the peerage by Gordon Brown and appointed Business Secretary. His contact with Epstein did not end. As Epstein was pleading guilty to child sex offences, Mandelson emailed him: “I think the world of you and I feel hopeless and furious about what has happened... Your friends stay with you and love you.” Little remorse there, shall we say, and little pity for the victims. After Lord Mandelson left office when Labour lost the election in 2010, he founded a lobbying firm, Global Counsel. Controversially, he did not name his clients. The House of Lords has rather slack rules about this, so somebody can create a company and just declare that they get however much money from the company, but they do not declare who the customers really are.”
“Deripaska’s activities were known to the British security services, and briefings were available to Mandelson, so, again, there is no excuse. He did this in the full knowledge of who he was dealing with. It was in this position that Mandelson promoted and signed off concessions to Russian aluminium companies, which ultimately benefited Mr Deripaska, or his companies, to the tune of $200 million a year. Although it did not actually happen, one company was due to be the subject of an initial public offering—due to be floated—shortly thereafter. A $200 million change in profits tends to mean a multibillion-dollar change in value, and that will have gone into the pocket of Mr Deripaska. As we all know, Deripaska is a nominee of Putin, so we can assume that a large chunk of it went to Putin as well.”
“Had the hon. Gentleman been here before the last election, he would have sat in this Chamber, I hope, and heard me opine on all those subjects and raise prospective laws to deal with those oligarchs, laws that, sadly, this Government have failed to carry through. That, then, is the backdrop. Mr Deripaska’s visa was revoked by the Americans in 2006, so Mandelson had no excuse for not knowing about his activities, yet as European trade commissioner he saw fit to accept hospitality from Deripaska on multiple occasions over several years, which included visiting him in Moscow and being flown by his private jet to stay at his dacha in Siberia and on his private yacht in the Mediterranean—all while considering whether to give Russian aluminium access to the European market.”
“That astonishing statement was followed later in 2021 by Mandelson being the only Labour peer to vote—against a three-line Whip—against a genocide amendment that would have meant this country had to reconsider any trade deal with a country found by the High Court to be committing genocide, and most specifically China was in the crosshairs. Frankly, it would appear that Lord Mandelson has subcontracted his conscience for money.”
“I am going to be very gentle. Let me just say that we are talking about a very serious issue, in which the national interest is engaged, and about somebody who in my view has used his public position to his own advantage and to the disadvantage of the state. That is not true of some candidate working in a junior role for the company, but it is true of the man who created that company and used it to promote his own interests. To come back to the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, from my point of view—and this is personal rather than political—even more worrying were the attitudes struck by Mandelson in February 2021 when, during a lobbying meeting on behalf of his rich clients, he told Chinese Premier Li Keqiang that the critics of Beijing’s human rights record would be “proved wrong”.”
“My right hon. Friend is exactly right, and the Senators to whom these documents were sent are very responsible ones. They would not frivolously pass on such documents to the FBI, and the FBI would not frivolously accept them and investigate.”
“I say to my right hon. Friend that the Prime Minister gave what was clearly—what can I say?—a lawyer’s answer to that question, which as we all know is not a proper answer at all. No. 10 was well aware that Mandelson had continued his relationship with Epstein after he was convicted as a paedophile. How the Prime Minister could possibly have thought it was wise to appoint a man who was on record consorting with alleged murderers and convicted paedophiles to a position of privilege and power is, to me, utterly unfathomable.”
“Mandelson’s past scandals and his links to Epstein were crystal clear by the time the Prime Minister rose to speak in PMQs last Wednesday.”
“Why, when our most important diplomat in our most important international relationship is under question or under investigation, would the Prime Minister not want to know the details of the investigation immediately? We understand that the Prime Minister’s chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, was talking to Mandelson all day on Tuesday, so what was Mandelson saying to McSweeney and was this passed to the Prime Minister? One of the things I would ask the Minister is if, later on, he can give the House an undertaking that we can have a record of that conversation, because we need to know. Mandelson gave an immediate interview on Wednesday morning—hours before Prime Minister’s questions—admitting that more embarrassing revelations would come out.”
“I agree—the hon. Member is right. Lord Mandelson’s continued support of Epstein shows an attitude that I find completely reprehensible in exactly that respect, because Epstein’s victims were women—young women, girls, children. So, yes, I do agree. It has long been clear that Mandelson was not suitable to be our ambassador, so the question is: what changed last week? The Bloomberg emails revealing further details of Epstein’s relationship with him and the birthday book in which he referred to Epstein as his “best pal” were with Mandelson by Monday evening and with the Foreign Office overnight or by Tuesday morning at the latest. The Prime Minister is said to have known of the investigation by Tuesday afternoon, but not of the content of the emails.”
“Most of what I have described was in the public domain. It does not take James Bond; Google could do this. What was not in the public domain was in the official records, or known to the intelligence agencies—in other words, it was all available to the Government. We know there was a two-page propriety and ethics briefing, which should have flagged concerns, but it merely triggered an unpenetrating email inquiry. That goes straight to the point raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Hinckley and Bosworth (Dr Evans), which is: where were the questions? Someone does not just send a three-line email and forget about it; they pursue the questions and cross-question the person under suspicion.”
“Exactly, and in fact earlier than that point. I will come back to that when I talk briefly about the vetting process. What precisely did the Prime Minister learn from reading the Bloomberg emails that was not already known about Lord Mandelson from public information and vetting done before the appointment? Each day that goes by, we see more shocking revelations not only about his misconduct and his links to Jeffrey Epstein, but about the failures of both the vetting process and the political judgment of those at the top of Government. I say to the hon. Member for Leeds East (Richard Burgon) that that relates not just to their political judgment, but to their moral standards and the equity in how they apply those moral standards across the board. That brings us to the question: what happened to the vetting process?”
“My right hon. Friend makes a very good point. I certainly think that that would be the right way to go for political appointments. It would probably be the right way to go for the top dozen embassies. I would not worry about all of them, without being rude to—well, I won’t pick a country. That would just be meaningless, but the top dozen are well worth doing.”
“The hon. Gentleman makes a good point. He is right and I will reiterate the point. In addition to what my right hon. Friend the Member for The Wrekin (Mark Pritchard) said, there should have been a fully developed vetting process and that appears not to have happened. There is a vetting unit in the Foreign Office and a vetting unit in the Cabinet Office, and normally one of them would have been engaged on this. There have been claims that developed vetting happens after an appointment. No, it does not. For existing ambassadors who are on a five-year vetting cycle, sure. For ambassadors or officers who are being read into a new class of material, sure. But for this—an outsider coming into the most sensitive job in Government—certainly not.”
“If Mandelson withheld information during the vetting process, will he lose the Labour Whip? I am looking at Mr Burgon when I say that. Is he going to have to resign from the House of Lords? Will Lord Mandelson be receiving compensation? Some reports in the media suggest we will pay £100,000 of taxpayers’ money. Will the Prime Minister, his chief of staff, his Cabinet Secretary and the permanent secretary to the FCDO appear before the Select Committees of the House to give evidence? Will the Minister provide the House with the documents—the propriety and ethics team report and the developed vetting report, if it exists—required to answer our questions as to who knew what and when? There are many quotes in the newspapers from those in the Minister’s own party about their horror regarding the Prime Minister’s decisions and processes.”
“He is being measured—remember this—against Karen Pierce, the officer in place who was probably the best ambassador in Washington and certainly the most revered, and, after her, Tim Barrow, who was our ambassador to the European Union during Brexit and the National Security Adviser. He knows all these things to the tips of fingers. Was Lord Mandelson better than them? Pull the other one. I am coming to the end, Mr Speaker, before you frown any more. No. 10 claims that Mandelson was economical with the truth. Mandelson claims he told the whole truth. Both statements cannot be true. The questions I pose to the Minister are these. Will the Government rule out Mandelson being brought back into Government? No. 10 refused to rule out giving him another job last week.”
“I have already said that my view is that ethical standards are absolute, so there should not be a trade-off. Let us take this, for a second, as a practical decision and take Mandelson at his own measure. He loves being called the dark lord and all the rest of it. He preens himself on being a master of the dark arts: spin, message management, political tactics and manipulation of the truth—a repertoire of things that most people would not be proud of. If the Government think that those skills actually make up for his sins, well no. First, he is not as good as he is cracked up to be, frankly.”
“No, I really am coming to an end. I will quote just one of them. This is a long-standing senior Labour Member: “I care that this culture of turning a blind eye to horrendous behaviour is endemic at the top of society”. I agree with him. When individuals with such associations are ushered back into the heart of Government, are we not right to ask what standards now govern appointments to public life? Impunity is not a right. Impropriety is not a technicality. And survivors of crime should not have to do the heavy lifting of holding the powerful to account. I mentioned at the beginning of my speech that a Bill has today been presented to the House imposing a duty of candour on public authorities and public officials. My last and single question to the Minister is this: will his Government now live up to the words in that Bill?”
“The hon. Member has made a theoretical argument and a general argument, but the actual argument is that Karen Pierce was a brilliant campaigner who would never have made the mistakes made by Lord Mandelson, which he alludes to, and she should not have been replaced.”
“Question put and agreed to. Resolved , That this House has considered the appointment process and the circumstances leading to the dismissal of the former United Kingdom Ambassador to the United States, Lord Mandelson.”
“On the Order Paper it is described as a “Bill to impose a duty on public authorities and public officials to act with candour, transparency and frankness; to make provision for the enforcement of that duty in their dealings with inquiries and investigations; to require public authorities to promote and take steps to maintain ethical conduct within all parts of the authority”. That is what we expect, and frankly, if we do not get the answers—by the sounds of it, we are not going to get them—we will return to this matter. The entire Opposition will return to the matter, and I suspect some Members from the Minister’s own party will return to the matter. I guarantee that I will be seeking to make sure that Ministers too are covered by the Bill, and when it eventually passes next year, I will be looking at what happens.”
“They said that these problems are bad enough when they are to do with the original error, but they get worse in the cover-up. They get worse if people do not actually admit what has happened. Honesty is not just important in this; it is also a survival characteristic for the Ministers involved. As I said, the Minister is the last Spartan at Thermopylae. He has not been sent here with the weapons to deal with this. He has not been sent here with the answers to the questions that we all properly have. I will finish as I started, by reminding him about that Bill that the Government announced today.”
“There is no need to hide behind security, because there is no national interest security issue. The issue is whether the system is working, and we cannot know unless we see those documents. We need the Ministers involved, and the advisers involved, to appear before the relevant Select Committees and to answer questions on this matter—and, if the Minister wants to hide behind security, they can even do that in camera, as long as it is done properly and they have the opportunity to test some of these assertions. The Minister and others received a great deal of good advice from a number of people, most notably the Father of the House, my right hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh), but from others too.”
“I am afraid that what this Minister has told the House does not seem to figure, especially when it is added to what was said by the Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee about the report from the propriety and ethics team being produced effectively without the FCDO’s input, which is—again—absolutely astonishing. The House itself has been remarkably unanimous, with one exception. The Leader of the Opposition made a characteristically sharply focused speech, and she made a number of comments with which, almost uniquely, the leader of every other party here agreed. She said that we needed the information and we needed the accountability. What does that mean? It means something that was highlighted by my right hon. Friend the Member for Aldridge-Brownhills (Wendy Morton): we need the release of all the documents.”
“The simple truth is, however, that I found it very hard to reconcile what he said about this clearance process with what I know was known by the agencies as long ago as 2008 about Mandelson’s behaviour, connections and the like, and the clear possibility of kompromat, to which one of my hon. Friends referred. There seem to be two possibilities. What often happens with direct vetting is that the agencies produce a series of risks for a Minister, and the Minister—in this case the Prime Minister, I assume—decides that those risks are worth taking. That is one possibility. The other possibility is that the vetting process was completely broken, and somehow or other it did not detect all those things that were in plain sight. That strikes me as implausible.”
“I am going to pause for a second. Let me say first to the Minster that I think everyone who spoke remembered the victims. After the sound of this political gunfire is long forgotten, they will still be suffering the scarring of what happened to them as a result of Mr Epstein’s behaviour, and I would say to the Minister that, without U-turns or whatever, he should say to his Prime Minister that at the next possible opportunity, at that Dispatch Box, he should apologise to those victims for what the Government have done to date. Secondly, let me say to the Minister that he is highly respected in the House. I see him almost as the last Spartan at Thermopylae, full of arrows as he stands there trying to defend an impossible position. It is a position in which a number of us have been ourselves, so I have some sympathy for him.”
“The House needs to know what vetting was done and when, what the opinions were of the Foreign Office, the Foreign Secretary, the Cabinet Office and the security services, and when the Prime Minister was told. We need to know who knew what, and when. The Government must take the House with them on these appointments, but their behaviour to date on this issue has been marked by obfuscation and delay, by recrimination and cover-up. It is not just a question of the Prime Minister’s political judgment, important as that is; it is a question of ethics. It is a question of what is deemed acceptable behaviour, when in positions of power. The House must have the opportunity to debate this matter before the recess.”
“What was public about Mandelson’s past is more than enough to disqualify him from consideration for ambassador, from his resignation from Government not once but twice—first in 1998 for not telling the truth about an interest-free loan, and then in 2001 for helping a wealthy businessman get a passport—to his links to the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, a gangster capitalist who benefited to the tune of many millions of pounds from policies promoted and signed off by Lord Mandelson when he was EU Trade Commissioner, and, particularly relevant today, his commercial links defending China. All of that was in the public domain before the Prime Minister appointed Lord Mandelson as our ambassador. Why was it ever thought acceptable to appoint a man with such a chequered and murky background to such a vitally important position?”
“His conduct, both prior to appointment and during, must reflect the highest standards of professionalism, discretion and integrity—nothing less will do. Lord Mandelson failed that test long before last week’s revelation, long before the understandable public outrage at the disgraceful behaviour with the paedophile Epstein, and long before the families of his victims quite rightly criticised the appointment.”
“I seek leave to propose that the House debates a specific and important matter requiring urgent consideration, namely the appointment process and circumstances leading to the dismissal of the former ambassador of the United Kingdom to the United States, Lord Mandelson. This is a matter of utmost concern across the House and across party lines. Our ambassador in Washington stands at the centre of Britain’s most vital bilateral relationship. It is a role of exceptional sensitivity, with more classified intelligence crossing the ambassador’s desk than reaches most Cabinet Ministers. The post carries immense responsibility. The ambassador represents Britain’s interests to our most powerful ally and, in so doing, shapes our reputation abroad.”
“I congratulate my parliamentary neighbour on his accession. It is good to see his talents recognised. Much of the technology currently used in sustainable aviation fuel is of foreign origin. Part of the reason for that is that no Government body directly supports the development of core technologies used for that, supporting only the development of production facilities. The Aerospace Technology Institute, for example, should be able to invest in research and development programmes to develop sustainable fuel, but is currently not permitted to do so. Will the Minister look at allowing that, so we can accelerate the development of our own technology in this area?”
“On the positive vetting process for when Peter Mandelson came to be a Minister again in 2010, section 3.1 of the ministerial code says: “Ministers…must ensure that no conflict arises, or could reasonably be perceived to arise, between their public duties and their private interests, financial or otherwise.” Secretaries of State do not have private diaries. He spent time in Mr Epstein flat, it seems quietly meeting other people involved in the Sempra deal. That cannot be seen as following his proper duties as Secretary of State. It was in the Government documents—it does not have to be a private email. Was that investigated, and was a judgment made on it?”
“The House needs to understand the sheer size of the failure of the vetting process here. It is in the public domain that Peter Mandelson had to resign for not telling the truth about an interest-free loan, and that he had to resign on a second occasion because he had helped a business friend to get a passport. Beyond that, there are still unresolved doubts about his behaviour as the European Trade Commissioner, when he gave concessions to the Russians, which helped his other dubious close friend, Mr Deripaska.”
“(Urgent Question): To ask the Minister of State for the Home Department if he will make a statement on the 2001 arrest of Saudi national Omar al-Bayoumi and the failure to extradite Mr al-Bayoumi for his alleged involvement in the 11 September terror attacks.”
“In that time we have extradited many innocent people to America, but we failed to extradite someone who deserved to be sent over there. We need to get to the bottom of this, in part so that we do not see this terrible atrocity happen again.”
“FBI records show that in 1999, al-Bayoumi met two officials from the Saudi Ministry of Islamic Affairs. Those officials were assessed to be part of a network of individuals connected with the facilitation of two 9/11 attackers. A separate 2017 assessment by the FBI’s Arabic specialists concluded that Mr al-Bayoumi was a co-optee of the Saudi General Intelligence Presidency, which is its secret service. A full investigation by the Intelligence and Security Committee is needed. It must investigate why the FBI clearly avoided extraditing Mr al-Bayoumi and exactly what was the involvement of the Saudi Government, in particular their Ministry of Islamic Affairs and secret service. As the Minister said, it is nearly 25 years since 9/11.”
“Yesterday’s edition of The S unday Times revealed that in the aftermath of 9/11 the Metropolitan police were forced to release Omar al-Bayoumi, who was believed to be a Saudi intelligence agent accused of supporting the hijackers, because the FBI withheld evidence. Arrested in Birmingham 10 days after 9/11, al-Bayoumi was taken to London to be interrogated by Met counter-terror officers. The FBI declined to provide those officers with vital evidence of al-Bayoumi’s involvement in 9/11. The evidence included a hand-drawn aircraft diagram, trajectory calculations matching the Pentagon attack, and an address book with the attackers’ code name—a code name that bin Laden himself did not disclose until a year later. The FBI’s refusal to disclose this evidence prevented al-Bayoumi’s extradition to the United States.”
“T6. To take the Health Secretary back to his promise to provide regional healthcare, the integrated care board is opening a consultation on the future of the hospital in Goole, after a decade of almost positively running it down. Will he instruct all the health services in the country to make the most of the valuable assets they have, not shut them down or misuse them, and actually deliver a local service for local people?”
“Given that answer, I will quote the Secretary of State. She was saying earlier that the system is so distorted that the financial allocations do not reflect the real needs of children. That means that local authorities have huge deficits through no fault of their own; they are trying to do their job. When she comes up with her new policy in the autumn, will she commit to writing off those deficits so that those authorities can do the job in the future?”
“They were arrested—not killed—by the rest of his patrol. Even today’s Daily Mail mentioned the rescue of Bernadette McAliskey. There was an attempt to kill her by the Ulster Defence Association. British soldiers rescued her even though she was effectively a political arm of the Irish National Liberation Army. The clearest demonstration of our real strategy is that, while 1,073 British forces, soldiers and policemen were killed by republican terrorists up until 1994, 145 paramilitaries were killed and 428 were taken prisoner. That means that around three or four were taken prisoner for every one killed. Seven British soldiers or policemen died for every IRA person who was killed. That tells us the strategy and it tells us what the IRA is trying to reverse.”
“The IRA’s campaign of violence was indiscriminate and extended far beyond the island of Ireland. I say to the hon. Member for North East Derbyshire that the number was not 722 if you include the police officers and UDR officers. If you include them, 1,073 servants of the British state were killed in the course of defending innocent civilians from those murderers. The IRA is trying to equate the British Government’s actions with that psychopathic behaviour, but of course nothing could be further from the truth. There is ample evidence of the Army taking enormous risks to arrest rather than take the often safer option of killing the terrorists. Consider the arrest—not the killing—of the South Armagh sniper. He killed seven people, but he was arrested and not killed. Consider the arrest—not the killing—of the killers of Captain Westmacott.”
“James Lynagh—nicknamed “The Executioner” by the Royal Ulster Constabulary—was believed to have been involved in more than 30 killings, including the cold-blooded assassination of the 80-year-old Sir Norman Stronge, who was largely blind and deaf, as well as his son in front of him. As for Patrick Kelly, who was the leader of that attack, he led the self-styled East Tyrone brigade, which is believed to have killed around 250 people before Loughgall. By the way, he also took part in the second attempt to assassinate brave UDR officer Glen Espie, who is sitting behind me in the Gallery. He fought off the assassins on two occasions—he was shot twice and fought off IRA assassins twice. If they had not been stopped, there is no doubt that all of these killers would have continued their psychopathic campaign of murder.”
“Those are the people we will put on trial if we allow them to lose their protection that we ought to be giving our veterans today. Look at the individuals involved, starting with Coagh where the inquest heard about Michael Ryan. Ryan was probably responsible for many murders; I can cite two. He shot two UDR officers—one in front of little children at a crossing, the other in front of the officer’s 13-year-old son. That is the sort of people we are dealing with. As for the IRA’s greatest defeat, Loughgall, the weapons recovered at the scene had been used in over 40 previous murders—there is no doubt about that. Of the IRA members there, McKearney and Arthurs were both involved in the Ballygawley police station attack, which killed a further two policemen.”
“Let me be clear: all of the IRA members who died in those exchanges—so-called “victims” in this context—were actively in the process of committing atrocities. They were trying to murder innocent people. At Coagh, they planned to murder an off-duty Ulster Defence Regiment officer. At Clonoe, they attacked the Coalisland police station using an armour-piercing machine gun in an attempt to murder the officers inside. At Loughgall, they drove a bomb-laden digger to blow up a police station and were armed and ready to murder any survivors. All were armed, dangerous and intent on murder. Many of them had killed before, making them a fatal risk to our soldiers—a risk our soldiers had to cope with in split-second decisions.”
“Every single one of those 2,000 people killed was an unlawful killing, to use the phrasing of the coroners courts these days. We do not need a court to establish that. How many of those IRA murders will be subject to inquiry? On the current listing—we have 33 listed—just two such cases, out of 2,000. That is because the major driver for these inquiries is the IRA-Sinn Féin effort to hide their own barbaric acts behind a freedom-fighting façade, trying to rewrite history with themselves as the heroes and the British state as the villains. That is why battles such as Coagh, Clonoe and, very likely soon, Loughgall feature so large in the demands for inquiries and the prosecution of long-retired, innocent British soldiers. All three of those actions were humiliating defeats for the IRA.”