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.”
The complete record
Every one of 5,828 lines we hold for David Davis, in date order, each linked to its source. Free to read, in full, without an account. Page 72 of 117.
“In March I raised this disreputable practice with Falck Renewables, prospective operators of a wind farm near my own village in my constituency. I asked it whether it was going to do the same. It did not reply. My constituents have no way to recover the tranquillity of the lives that they thought they were going to enjoy when they first moved to rural Yorkshire. They can neither sell their house nor get any financial recompense to enable them to afford to move, so they are trapped in this misery. My point is a simple one. My constituents are just individual representatives of a situation that is repeated up and down the country. Wind farm companies must be adequately capitalised so that there can be a reasonable prospect of financial success for prospective litigants whose way of life they have damaged.”
“My constituent, fearing his retirement has been ruined and his home thoroughly devalued, attempted to use his legal insurance to claim for nuisance from the wind farm operators. While there was a good chance of success in court, the company’s finances were organised so that there was no realistic prospect of recovering either damages or the legal costs of bringing the case. That being so, his insurers would, quite understandably, not cover his legal costs. That is despite the fact that the eventual owner of the wind farm is AES, a multibillion dollar international company involved partly in renewables but largely in coal and gas, that paid its chief executive $8.4 million last year. It laughably claims in its annual report to be a “World’s Most Ethical Company”. It is not alone in its hypocrisy.”
“One of my constituents bought his house in my constituency to enjoy a quiet retirement with his wife. After living there for more than a decade a 10-turbine wind farm was built near the house. The closest windmill is just over 600 metres from his home. He was assured at the planning stage that the wind farm would not trouble him, yet he has suffered the misery of regular noise and turbine blade flicker which has rendered his home almost unliveable. The low frequency noise from the turbines easily penetrates the double glazing. The couple have had to change bedrooms in order to sleep, but even so the persistent noise from the wind farm has taken its toll on his wife’s health; she now suffers heart palpitations and is prescribed anti-depressants on a permanent basis by her doctor.”
“The parent company provides a loan to a specially created subsidiary to set up the wind farm, then leaves it in control of operations. The subsidiary’s balance sheet typically comprises the wind farm physical assets, but they are more than offset by a very large loan from the parent company, with a resulting net liability. Profits from energy generation and large amounts of public subsidy are siphoned off to the parent company. The subsidiary is left as a financial shell, with very few liquid assets and total liabilities greater than total assets. That makes it impossible to bring litigation against a wind farm, simply because there is nothing to win from them. As such companies have negative net assets, even liquidating them would generate no cash to pay either damages or a legal bill.”
“Numerous studies have identified that sleep is disturbed on a regular basis even at distances over 1 km away from turbines, yet under the ETSU standards turbines can be installed just 600 metres away from residential property. The wind farm companies are acutely aware of this, and all the more so since a member of the public, Jane Davis, sued a wind farm near her home for noise nuisance. The matter was settled out of court, and there is a gagging order preventing us from knowing the details, but the settlement is rumoured to have been in the region of £2 million. Since this case, some dubious measures have been taken by the industry to obstruct perfectly legitimate claims for nuisance. The use of shell companies in the wind industry seems to be the commonest trick.”
“In 1995 the World Health Organisation recommended that to prevent sleep interruption low frequency noise should not exceed 30 decibels. However, in 1996 the Government’s Energy Technology Support Unit—ETSU—set the noise limit for wind turbines at 43 decibels. That is an enormous difference; on the logarithmic decibel scale it is approximately double the WHO limit. We still use those standards today. In the last five years no planning application was refused on noise-related grounds, but there have been 600 noise-related incidents arising from wind farm operations. The majority of complaints arise as a result of amplitude modulation, which is the loud, continuous thumping or swishing noise regularly described by those living near wind farms.”
“I beg to move, That leave be given to bring in a Bill to require the Secretary of State to make provision about obligations on wind farm operators in respect of financial cover for potential liabilities arising from cause of public nuisance; and for connected purposes. Wind farms are contentious. Some argue passionately that they are a great public good and the solution to global warming while others equally passionately believe they are a waste of money. This Bill takes no side in that debate. It is narrowly defined to one aspect of public interest: it requires the operators of wind farms, who are in receipt of £797 million of public subsidy a year, to organise their affairs so that they are able to meet the costs of any nuisance imposed on people living near them.”
“I commend my right hon. Friend for amending the timetable on this matter, which is serious and important for the interests of the English, the Scots and the Union. Before the next debate, will he publish a list of the measures in the Queen’s Speech that he thinks will be affected in terms of who can vote for them?”
“I am one of those who have raised very firmly with my right hon. Friend the question of the Barnett formula. The handling of the House’s procedures is as much about perceived fairness as it is about actual fairness. He is right to say that most Bills do not have large carry-over implications for funding, but occasionally they might and under such circumstances the Bill’s money resolution becomes incredibly important. I make this point speculatively—I have not come to a conclusion on it myself yet—but perhaps my right hon. Friend should allow the House to debate such money resolutions so that if, for example, the right hon. Member for Gordon (Alex Salmond) wanted to object to a particular measure because of its money implications, he could then do so.”
“We are thus in the peculiar position of having a constitutional change to our House of Commons that is put in very quickly, with probably not enough consideration, and that a future Government can take out equally quickly. That is, in many ways, even more dangerous than the mechanism we have chosen.”
“While I understand that, the same argument would have applied equally to the Bill that became the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011, for example, yet that was capable of being drafted in such a way that the courts would not dare meddle in it, as they would not dare meddle in this. Whatever the legal position, the political position of our courts is that they would not interfere in something as fundamental as the balance of power between the parts of the Union. I take a very serious view of this, because it takes out of play, in a constitutional ruling, the House of Lords and the whole mechanism that we usually apply to these matters.”
“I propose to speak very briefly as I have only one substantive point of principle to make. I start by again commending the Leader of the House for taking on board the concerns of Members on both sides of the House and for the approach that he has taken. I have as much taste for political combat as the next man, but the tenor of this debate—I say this to my Unionist colleagues in all parts of the House—matters almost as much as the content in terms of not generating grievance and nationalist causes, shall we say, as a direct result of our attempt to stabilise our constitution. That said, I do take issue with the Government over the approach of using Standing Orders. The simple argument made to me at the beginning was that this was to protect any change from interference by the courts.”
“I am afraid that I could not disagree more. The simple truth is that we have made it down the centuries with an unwritten constitution that has existed because of the respect given to it on both sides of the House. That has fragmented in the past decade or two. I do not want to have a circumstance where the rules of operation adversely affect the democratic rights of our citizens. By the way, we have been talking all the time about the democratic rights, or standards, of MPs and whether we have one or two classes of MP, but what matters is that we have one class of citizen. I do not want that to be subject to the vagaries of any future Government.”
“It is wrong, for the reasons I described. As the hon. Gentleman well knows, I take the view that Governments should be subject to the law of the land and subject to courts. I am less happy with the idea that the courts could rewrite our constitution in a way that we do not see fit.”
“The test is whether it deals with and removes any prospective grievance not from the Members on the SNP Benches, the Labour Benches or the Government Benches, but from the people we represent. It should take away any grievance for the English, the Scots, the Welsh and the Northern Irish, not any grievance for the Labour party, the Conservative party, the SNP or the Liberal Democrats. The test he should apply is whether it puts our citizens first.”
“We see that written through all this constitutional area, because the establishment does not want to address the problem. The establishment does not want an English First Minister who is more powerful than the UK Prime Minister. Yet if we went down a proper route of English devolution—if that is what it is—we would of course end up with an English Government who were a challenge to the UK Government. The Leader of the House has now given us the summer to think about this. We can, I hope, deliberate about it at great length before we return in September, and I hope that he will take on board what he hears today. The only point of principle I will make to him is that the test for this is very simple. It is not whether this creates two classes of MP, but whether it creates two classes of citizen.”
“There will be tax competition between the parts of the United Kingdom, and competition between policies of various sorts. We cannot resolve all that. We cannot necessarily give Scottish Members some sort of veto over England’s right to do the best for its citizens. This is not entirely soluble, but it would have been much more soluble if we had written the Scotland Act in such a way that it created a more rational structure than what exists in our kingdom at the moment. All that gives us and the Leader of the House the problematic issue of how this can be done with utter fairness to all sides, because that is the test. I am afraid that the British establishment always seems to have a preference for fudge rather than clarity and for ambiguity rather than logic.”
“I must say to Opposition Front Benchers, that our points were received with a completely implacable lack of understanding, let alone a lack of sympathy, from the primary driver of that, Gordon Brown. The problem arises from the confusion in the Scotland Act and the Scotland Bill that is currently going through the House. The 1998 Act failed to create what, in my view, would have been stable fiscal autonomy for the current Holyrood Parliament. It would have done so if it had separated out the funding streams for the Scottish Parliament’s spending and the spending that emanates from this Parliament. If that had been done, we would have had very few, if any, Barnett consequentials. We cannot of course solve everything. The right hon. Member for Gordon has quite rightly made the point about other impacts, such as in relation to tuition fees.”
“The House will take that on board. My other point about what the Leader of the House has done so far is to commend him on at least attempting to address the problem of the Barnett consequentials. This is very important for the point on which I will finish. The problem started in 1998. I guess that the right hon. Member for Gordon (Alex Salmond) will remember—no one else in the House would have reason to do so—that in 1998 I argued for fiscal autonomy for the new Scottish Parliament, for a more federal solution and for proper treatment of the West Lothian question. All those things were self-evident in 1998 as long-term problems with the devolution proposal.”
“Further to that point of order, Mr Speaker. I should like your guidance on a similar point. Because, as you have told the House, the motion was simply saying that we discussed the issue today, many of us abstained rather than vote for it because we, too, feel that we need more time to discuss the matter at greater length. I am seeking your guidance on how we communicate that to the Government.”
“Will the Home Secretary please look hard at this recommendation, with a strong recommendation that it is carried out and the transfer of power from ministerial authority to proper judicial authority takes place as soon as possible?”
“Mr Anderson said in the preamble to his excellent report: “The current law is fragmented, obscure, under constant challenge and variable in the protections that it affords the innocent.” He went on to say: “A multitude of alternative powers, some of them without statutory safeguards, confuse the picture further. This state of affairs is undemocratic, unnecessary and—in the long run—intolerable.” Of his 124 recommendations, the shadow Home Secretary picked up on perhaps the most important—the one relating to this issue of judicial authorisation. This country relies on ministerial authorisation more than any other country in the world, with the possible exception of Zimbabwe.”
“On a point of order, Mr Speaker. I apologise for interfering briefly in this important debate. On Thursday, the Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation, Mr David Anderson, is publishing a 300-page report on surveillance strategy. It is normal for the Government’s reports to be presented to the House first, before anybody else, but I understand that there are major press briefings tomorrow about it, meaning that we will not be the first to hear about it. We will hear about it first on the “Today” programme, rather than in the House of Commons. Can you advise me, Mr Speaker, on what we can do to bring the Government to heel on this matter?”
“Because it is low-cost, high-security accommodation, people never move out of it, so how is it the answer to the problem that someone in a housing association flat or house monopolises it for life and it never becomes available to other people who properly want social housing?”
“I agree with my hon. Friend about our hon. Friend the Member for Thurrock (Jackie Doyle-Price)—she is a magnificent lady. Does he agree that there is an argument for doing away with opinion polls for the duration of a general election?”
“How does my right hon. and learned Friend reconcile that with the fact that our primary ally, the United States, with its National Security Agency, which entirely mirrors GCHQ, is as we speak moving away from the block collection of data and treating that as wholly unconstitutional?”
“Ideally, therefore, I would like us to keep the main thrust of the HRA but bring the Court judgments back to our own Supreme Court. Unfortunately this produces for us a serious conundrum to which I have not yet heard any Government Minister give an answer. As it stands, the European convention on human rights, in the hands of Strasbourg, is entrenched; no British Government could change it. If we bring its provisions back to the United Kingdom, then it is no longer entrenched. Looking at the history of the past 20 years, I ask myself how Governments would have responded when, let us say, 90 days’ detention without charge went across this set of tramlines, or control orders, or DNA, or anything else. What the Government would do, of course, is change the constitutional measure that was put in place to uphold the Court.”
“Bearing in mind that I was the person, along with Jack Straw, who brought to this House the motion that stopped the imposition of prisoner votes on this country, I have a very sceptical view of the ECHR, yet I found that I agreed with some 90% of the judgments, on such diverse things as taking away from the Government the right to keep the DNA of innocent people for years, through to preserving the right of British citizens to wear a crucifix while at work. That is the level of diversity that we are talking about. The number of things I did not like was quite small, and that came about largely as a result of the nature of the Court as a body without any feeling for the history and tradition of Britain, with a lot of people from different countries who have no reason to know about our history.”
“With only 19 days to go until the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta, it at least shows some sensitivity to the history of our country and what we stand for—something to which my right hon. and learned Friend referred. We should remember that the biggest lesson of Magna Carta is that the acquisition of liberty and loss of liberty in our history has often happened by accident as much as by plan. We must think about the unintended consequences of what we do when we set about changing these major constitutional issues. Before this debate I spent a little time looking through the list of adverse judgments against the United Kingdom by the European Court of Human Rights since we joined, but mainly since 2001, when the HRA came into effect.”
“We should make our judgments in future on the basis of knowledge, not of assertion and counter-assertion from the two sides of Hadrian’s Wall. That is one issue, and we will come back to it in detail no doubt during the debate on the various measures relating to both Scotland and England. Like my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Beaconsfield (Mr Grieve), the aspect of this Queen’s Speech that worries me most is the whole question of Human Rights Act repeal, and, with that, the introduction of the counter-terrorism Bill and the communications data Bill—the so-called snoopers charter. I am very pleased that the Government have decided to step back from an immediate rush into repealing the Human Rights Act. That seems very sensible.”
“When I was the Public Accounts Committee Chairman in 1998-99, I went to see Gordon Brown to tell him that the mechanism that he had chosen, of having Holyrood dependent on an opaque, virtually incomprehensible subvention formula, was a grievance machine: it would create grievances in Scotland and England. As such it was a destabilising measure, not a stabilising one. We need to grip this issue. We need to enable the Scottish Parliament to pay its own way from funding that it raises and controls, both in policy and Executive terms, and to ensure that subventions provided from the rest of the United Kingdom, in the form of pensions and other welfare costs, are properly costed, as are all the other taxes raised in Scotland that do not go to the Scottish Parliament.”
“At the same time, it will release money to allow new social housing, which every Government in the past 20 years have failed to provide on a sufficient scale. Indeed, the last Labour Government failed in 13 years to provide as much social housing as was built in one year under Margaret Thatcher. We all have to face that fact. I want to talk about three areas of concern, many of which have been mentioned, especially by my right hon. and learned Friend the erstwhile Attorney General. The first is the Scotland Bill. I am sorry that the right hon. Member for Gordon (Alex Salmond) is not here, because he would have some views on this. Despite my being a firm Unionist, I have long been an advocate—since 1998, in fact—of more fiscal autonomy for the Scottish Parliament.”
“I would do more myself, but the moves are, at least, beneficial. I welcome the enterprise Bill, which will build on the economic success of the past few years. It will create jobs so it will probably do more to reduce poverty in this country than any other social measure. I welcome the childcare Bill, which doubles free childcare to 30 hours a week—indeed, I would again go further and reduce some of the restrictions on that childcare provision. That would help underpin the lives of ordinary people in a beneficial way. I also welcome the right-to-buy Bill. It is controversial, but done properly—that point matters—it will improve ordinary working people’s ability to get on to the property ladder. The failure to do that has been decried on both sides of the House.”
“Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker; I will try to be disciplined in my taking of interventions. It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Carmarthen East and Dinefwr (Jonathan Edwards). I shall not follow him down the route of devolution for Wales, despite the fact that my name is Davis. The House will be unsurprised that I find a great deal to approve of in this Queen’s Speech; it is, after all, the first to be delivered by a solely Conservative Government for nearly 20 years. I particularly welcome the European Union referendum Bill. Contrary to what has been said, it is asking the people’s permission to do something—stay in or leave. It is not anything else beyond that and it is long overdue. I also welcome the education and adoption Bill, which involves two sets of moves in the right direction.”
“We are in a small-majority Parliament. I do not want a return to the trials and tribulations of the ’92-’97 Parliament, but I do want a Government who do not just try to solve everything in Whitehall or in a specially selected Committee with specially selected Members. I want these problems to be solved on the Floor of this House, and I hope that they give us the time to do it.”
“If one holds the data, one has the power of the Stasi even if one does not behave like the Stasi—the power of a totalitarian state even if one does not behave like a totalitarian state. All those of us who have been here for many years have seen Governments, from time to time, misuse the data they have in front of them. I would be very unwilling for us to move further down that route, particularly because the Americans, as we speak, have passed the USA Freedom Bill—Act, as it will be—by some 330 votes to 88 votes in Congress. That will reverse exactly the sort of mass collection of data that is being proposed here. It is implausible to argue that the Americans do not need it but somehow we do. I welcome the main parts of the Queen’s Speech, but some are incredibly difficult in terms of liberty and justice in this country.”
“Let us remember that Voltaire’s comment, accurately, was this: “I despise what you say but I will fight to the death for your right to say it.” I repeat: “despise what you say”. We must remember that freedom of speech is the right of people to say things we do not like and are not comfortable with. On the communications data Bill, I differ dramatically from the previous Attorney General, my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Beaconsfield. I have watched over many years the operation of our agencies and the foreign agencies. Most of them, pretty much all the time, behave honourably in collecting data, but they take the view that collecting data is not wrong; only looking at it is wrong. I am afraid that is semantic nonsense.”
“I am afraid that at the moment, as it stands, I am unwilling to support Human Rights Act abolition unless I hear an answer to that conundrum, as well as the others put to the House by my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Beaconsfield. I have concerns about the counter-terrorism Bill, which intends to move us from stopping people making speeches that incite violence to stopping ones that incite hatred. I suspect that many people in this House have made speeches that incite hatred, sometimes deliberately, sometimes not. How on earth we are going to make the judgment as to what crosses this line and what does not without massively impeding our freedom of speech, I do not know.”
“That was my view 20 years ago. Since then, I have lived through three sets of Governments, none of whom I would trust with the protection of liberty in this country. Three clauses are left out of how many? I have forgotten; a very large number have disappeared. The harsh truth is that in the modern world Governments are very quick to modify things that are inconvenient to them. When the Blair Government were in power, they were very happy to do things that were just procedural issues that the public did not pay any attention to, even though their effects were enormous. The only way to deal with this is to undertake a written constitution for the United Kingdom. That could not be done on a partisan basis—it would have to be bipartisan— and it would take years, more than a single Parliament.”
“Does the hon. Gentleman agree that we in this Parliament should return to the old tradition of having multi-day debates on matters of constitutional importance, such as human rights?”
“In the past year there have been a number of revelations about the police improperly hacking into journalists’ telephone calls, and improperly breaching the legal privilege of suspects and using the information they obtain from doing so. The Government have been very coy about responding to my requests about the current state of the Wilson doctrine. If the allegations that have now come out are true, that indicates that the Wilson doctrine was broken in spirit, if not in the letter. Will the Minister make sure that the inquiry comes right up to date in terms of what it looks into and that it is drawn broadly enough to ensure that none of these risks exists today?”
“I started with the presumption that I would vote in favour of a secret ballot for the Speaker. However, this is a constitutional matter of some importance that also goes to the heart of the relationship between the Executive and this Parliament, and as such, it should have been heard on a prime-time day, with the whole House here, with plenty of time. Instead, if the House votes for this today, people will get the impression that what should have been a constitutional matter has been allowed to become an ad hominem matter, and a rather mean-spirited one at that, and that in future this House will tolerate the Executive taking action against an uncomfortable and difficult Speaker.”
“I am not necessarily sympathetic if there is any question of guilt on the part of the people picked up. However, what strikes me about this case is that the US was offering $5,000 ransoms or rewards, and it is too easy to forget that in Afghanistan at that time, $5,000 would have been equivalent to hundreds of thousands of pounds in this country. When it was a poor village that handed him over, I will not say that I do not blame them—I do—but it could be seen as understandable. What that does, however, is to call into extreme question any suggestion of Shaker Aamer’s guilt.”
“I do not want to take up too much time, so I will finish by simply saying that the west has had a moral slough of despond after 9/11. We have abandoned our own standards and fallen short of the ethical standards that we should uphold. It is now doubly incumbent on us to act to ensure that those who have suffered as a result are released to their families as rapidly as possible, before their health is completely destroyed, which is what Shaker Aamer faces. It is also important to our own nations and citizens that we confess.”
“The colonel who headed the unit of American military lawyers who both prosecute and defend people in Guantanamo told them at the beginning of their military commission that they should be wary of any techniques and tactics that they allowed to be used, because, in his words, in America there is no such thing as a secret, just deferred disclosure. That is eminently true in the case under discussion. The more rapid that disclosure, the better for every country. I can understand to some extent why, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, we dropped the moral standards by which we ought to abide—that was wrong, but understandable. I do not understand, however, the continued attempt to cover things up a dozen and more years later. For that reason, too, Shaker ought to be released.”
“Our understanding is that Shaker has been a representative in the disputes in Guantanamo, which may make him more of a target. In addition to his own torture, he is said to have witnessed the torture of others, which may be why his release is being withheld. He is the last British resident being held there. I join the hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) in asking the Minister to give an account of the Americans’ explanation of why they have not released Shaker. If they have not done so because he would embarrass them, that represents a doubling up of the guilt on their part. Frankly, this will come out into the open at some point.”
“In fact, what is going on is much worse than what we gave up and deemed to be torture. However, that is the basis on which Shaker Aamer is being held. The same sort of torture led the American Government to conclude that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, as they tortured someone else 83 times until they eventually said, “Yes, yes, I give in.” That means that, even if there were confessional evidence against Shaker, it would be completely untrustworthy; indeed, it would be thrown out, as Clive Stafford Smith of Reprieve has said. From the point of view of basic humanity, for somebody who is innocent to be put through that is probably 10 times as bad as it is for somebody who is guilty, and it would be bad for them, too.”
“Our legal system and the American legal system are based on a very important principle, the principle of the presumption of innocence. That has not been extended to Shaker Aamer. What is more, in his case, although we are not in a position to make the judgment ourselves, a great deal of evidence, from how he was picked up on the basis of a ransom through to the statements of the US authorities that there is no case against him, shows a probability of innocence, yet this man has faced 13 years in the most unbelievable circumstances. I make the point about innocence because it is one thing for a terrorist or soldier to be subjected to this sort of behaviour, involving the sort of treatment that the British Government gave up in the early 1970s after using it in Northern Ireland because it was deemed to be torture.”
“It may say two things. The first—it saddens me to say this—is that President Obama may not be in complete control of his own country. After all, he promised to close down Guantanamo early on but then did not do so, at great political cost to himself and, indeed, to his moral standing. Secondly, when it comes down to it, America puts its own interests far ahead of those of any other country. That is the doctrine of American exceptionalism, which in one sense is understandable because it is based on freedom, but in another sense it leads to the almost colonial treatment of its allies. If that is the case, it is deplorable. As America’s longest-standing and strongest ally, we should expect special treatment, but we have clearly not been given it in this case.”
“Indeed, by behaving like the guy in the black hat rather than the guy in the white hat, we have essentially done what al-Qaeda would have liked us to do. That is why I say that we have a duty to our own citizens in this matter just as much as we have a duty to Shaker Aamer. We are letting our citizens down as well as letting him down. We are betraying the standards that millions died to protect in two world wars over the past century, and we are increasing the risk of terrorism because this situation legitimises the kind of barbarous behaviour that we have seen too much of in the past few years. I shall finish by joining the hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington in asking the Minister to give an undertaking that we will redouble our efforts and not give up until Shaker Aamer is returned to his family.”