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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“My right hon. Friend makes a formidably important point. The amendment highlights one of the extraordinary weaknesses of the Bill, which is that it in effect reverses GDPR on a large number of citizen protections. To reiterate the point he gently made, that enormous fine will not stop TikTok, because it operates under legal compulsion. Even though it paid £450 million, it will continue to commit the criminal offence for which it has just been convicted.”
“The hon. Gentleman is making an excellent speech and some very perceptive points. I remind him that previous attempts by the NHS to create a single data standard have all failed, because the GPs did not believe that the security levels were sufficient. It is not just the Information Commissioner; the GPs refused to co-operate, which highlights the powerful point that the hon. Gentleman is making.”
“Will you, Madam Deputy Speaker, ask the House authorities to speak with the Independent Press Standards Organisation to remind it that the British press has an absolute right to report on what is said here in this Chamber without any hindrance or conditionality?”
“On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. Today’s Daily Telegraph says that it has been reprimanded by the Independent Press Standards Organisation for reporting on remarks made in this Chamber by the then Communities Secretary Michael Gove. IPSO asserted that the Telegraph should not have reported without having first given a right of reply to the group that the remarks related to. Press freedom is a cornerstone of democracy, and for centuries the right to freely report on the proceedings of this House have been protected in British law. Those freedoms allowing the press to report without any hindrance or conditionality were secured as long ago as 1771 by John Wilkes. While IPSO may think it is being responsible, its reprimanding of the Telegraph undermines those fundamental rights.”
“Does the Minister recognise that the Government’s own assessment of the effectiveness of the Bill is that it will recover a tiny 1.8% of losses?”
“I thank the Minister for giving way, and I hope he will forgive me for waiting till what appears to be the end of his list. When the hon. Member for Blyth and Ashington (Ian Lavery) asked him about the application of the Human Rights Act in this context, he said that the Bill did not breach it, in effect. My advice is a little different, and I waited to hear about his amendments to see whether anything in them changed that. My advice is that suspicionless financial surveillance could breach article 8, which covers the right to privacy, and article 14 on the prohibition of discrimination. Will the Minister make his legal advice on this available to the House? This is incredibly important and it is central to the major criticism of this Bill.”
“The hon. Gentleman has got to a point on which I wholeheartedly agree with him. Something like 9.8 million people will fall directly under the reach of this Bill; if we include their carers, landlords and a variety of other people, it is more than 10 million people. I would think that the number of fraudsters in that number is very small, but not vanishingly small, so we will put probably more than 9 million people under unnecessary surveillance. He is right to call that Orwellian.”
“I am a signatory to amendment 11. In answer to the point that has just been made to the hon. Gentleman, if the banks use algorithms, they will have an error rate of at least 1%. That means 10,000 or more innocent people will be dragged through the system by this proposal.”
“The right hon. Gentleman goes right to the point I tried to make with the Minister. There are 25 NGOs supporting amendment 11. It is almost certain that if we go down this route, it will end up in court. I think the Government will lose on article 8, on the question of individual privacy.”
“Q11. British Governments of all political persuasions have long taken pride in reducing the carbon footprint of the British manufacturing industry. Unfortunately, in too many cases, too much of that so-called reduction has been achieved by driving British industry abroad to countries such as China and India that actually use more carbon to produce the same product—British Steel is just the latest example of that—which is bad for the global environment and disastrous for the British economy. That is against a background of European carbon policies that have failed over 20 years. Does the Prime Minister have a new domestic British policy that will protect British industry from this disastrous long-term trend?”
“May I press the Secretary of State on transcripts? When I asked recently for a transcript of a major trial, Manchester Crown court told me that the cost would be £100,000; when pressed, that went down to £9,000, but that is still way beyond the reach of most people. This is a travesty of justice. Other countries, including some American states, have free transcripts available now. When will she sort this out?”
“I ask the Secretary of State to take the House into his confidence and do this properly.”
“From what the Secretary of State has described, it is beginning to sound as though Jingye is trying to manoeuvre the Government into a recompensed nationalisation. Will he make it plain that if it tries to manoeuvre us into nationalisation, we will pay not more than a penny for the business?”
“In fact, if I were to recommend any amendment to the Bill, it would be an amendment to limit to one penny the amount of money that the Government could pay to Jingye, because then no court could challenge that amount, and Jingye would know full well that it was not in line to make money out of the British taxpayer. We have to look at this in strategic and tactical terms.”
“I am not a fan of nationalisation, as the Secretary of State will know, but I would have voted for nationalisation. I will vote for this Bill, for a simple reason: it buys us time. People have to understand that this is a reprieve, not a rescue. I do not agree with the hon. Member for Boston and Skegness (Richard Tice) on his strategic nationalisation argument. Nationalisation under these circumstances buys the Secretary of State time and leverage, and he needs to be able to use his judgment on how to use that time and leverage. We have had just a hint of a view of how complex a game Jingye is playing.”
“You will not need reminding, Mr Deputy Speaker, but I will remind the House of quite how unusual a day this is, for a variety of reasons. The last time we met on a Saturday was at a time of war, and the last time we put a Bill through in one day was at the beginning of the pandemic. That is how serious the disastrous circumstances in which we find ourselves are. I assume that this House will accept the Bill, so I will address my comments directly to the Secretary of State. At one level, this is a “nationalisation in all but name” Bill, because of the powers it gives the Government. Indeed, it actually gives them more powers than a nationalisation Bill would. It will allow the Government to do things that they could not do under a nationalisation Bill. Frankly, I would have voted for one.”
“I am afraid that most of our successes in carbon reduction over the last decade or two—or three—have been by dint of exporting industries to other countries, often with much worse records than us. In this case it would be China. China has 50% of the world market already. It has massive excess in steel capacity, and its steel capacity is the most carbon inefficient there is, so we would actually be worsening the circumstances.”
“If those on the Government Benches want me to, I can go back to 1997 and park blame, but I do not want to do that today. I want to make this viable. We have to get our energy, environmental and industrial policies all in line to make this work. To put this in context, last year British Steel lost about £408 million—that was the September number. This year it is about £250 million. Neither of those are small amounts of money. The Treasury would shut down an operation if we just left something like that running inside the Government for very long. We need a new strategy that cuts our carbon emissions without exporting our industry to the rest of the world.”
“As Members have said, that means having an energy policy that makes the plant viable—not just viable when it is owned by the state, but commercially viable. It means having an energy policy under which we do not have the highest energy costs of our competitors, which we do now. It also means that we have to think very hard about carbon supply. At the moment, the technology does not exist that allows us to make primary steel without carbon supply, so we have to think about that. Primary steel is a strategic supply, so we cannot rely on another country for it. I want to see this Bill used in a way that gives the Secretary of State the time to deliver those things, but it must also give this House the right to see what he is doing and how the strategies are turning out. Nobody has got this right.”
“If the hon. Lady will forgive me, I will not, because lots of people want to speak. I will refer to something she said in a minute, so if she really needs to intervene, I will let her come in then. We are trying to manage a disaster—a disaster for Scunthorpe, which is local to me, as members of my community work at Scunthorpe. The knock-on economic effects will be felt much more widely than in one town; this will affect thousands and thousands of people all round. This is also a disaster for our last primary steelmaker, and steelmaking has suddenly become more important. It was always an important part of national strategy, but Mr Trump has made it a vital, unavoidable piece of national strategy. We have to create a circumstance that allows the Secretary of State and the Government to manoeuvre us through that.”
“For those who have not read that legislation, we spent a year putting it in place under the Blair Government, and it has recourse to Parliament at every turn: Ministers are properly controlled, it must be transparent, and so on. I suggest to him that at some point he might organise a transition to that, so that the House has greater control. The Coronavirus Act 2020 did not have that—it missed all those defences—and look what happened to the policy as a result. This is what I would like to see: recourse to Parliament over the actions the Secretary of State takes to manage the survival of Scunthorpe and the policies to ensure its viability and, in the post-Putin and Trump era, the security of supply. We want to see all those things, and we can organise legislation to permit them.”
“I am afraid the right hon. Member is right. The difficulty is that we are in a new world. The terrible thing is—the House will only ever hear me say this once—that Trump has a small point in some respects, and we have to deal with the world as it is. Moving on to the sunset clause, I can imagine that the instinct is not to put a sunset clause in the Bill, because we are dealing with a difficult negotiator, and putting in a sunset clause would be putting in a backstop. When we put a backstop on ourselves, we give the other side a negotiating advantage. In his speech, the Secretary of State mentioned that the Civil Contingencies Act 2004 would be a route.”
“14. What discussions she has had with the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Secretary of State for Education on the potential implications for her policies of councils becoming insolvent due to inadequate funding for SEND education.”
“Next March, when local authorities can no longer exclude the high needs elements from their balance sheets, half of them will go bankrupt as it now stands. For the East Riding, it is estimated that this year’s education budget is £17 million in deficit. That is largely because of increased high needs spending on pupils with special education needs. Can the Minister give me an undertaking that we will not next year find ourselves either crushing the needs of special needs children or those of other needs in society?”
“Needless to say, everyone wishes the Secretary of State well with that. In March, the Chancellor said: “The regulatory system has become burdensome to the point of choking off innovation, investment and growth. We will free businesses from that stranglehold”. In my constituency, the Finnish company Metsä Tissue wants to invest hundreds of millions to build a state-of-the-art tissue manufacturing plant. The investment will provide 400 direct jobs, thousands of other jobs and £30 million a year for the local economy, but although the site is a freeport, the investment is hampered by monumental costs of £113 million to make it ready, although the same process on an equivalent site in Sweden will cost £4.5 million. What are the Government doing to correct this problem?”
“Since we are swapping villages, I was in Pocklington last week, at the site of what Professor Alice Roberts described as the most important iron age archaeological site in Britain: the Pocklington chariot burial. It is a magnificent thing, and the centre of a huge area of iron age archaeology. I was there to meet dedicated local volunteers who are creating a new museum at Burnby Hall based on that archaeology, which will bring tourists into the countryside. What can the Government do to help people like that develop ideas such as this?”
“I say to the Secretary of State, surely we owe them no less than security, freedom and justice in return.”
“They made £5 million or £6 million a year from protection rackets, smuggling, extortion, drugs, tax fraud, state benefit fraud, fraudulent front companies, illegal gambling, theft and other crimes throughout the island of Ireland. If colleagues want evidence of that criminality, in 1990 I carried out an investigation of those activities, which was written up on 6 November of that year in the Financial Times . The point is that the IRA was both a criminal gang and a terrorist organisation. Now it is trying to rewrite history.”
“Those figures, and that ratio reveal the discipline and restraint of our soldiers and our policemen acting under yellow card rules. They also reflect the personal risk to the soldiers and policemen of observing those rules. Unsurprisingly, the IRA members never carried a yellow card. They targeted civilians and committed murder without warning. Their methods ranged from torture, followed by a bullet in the back of the head, through to the mass murder of innocent civilians in atrocities such as the Omagh, Claudy and Ballykelly bombings and the utterly cold-blooded Kingsmill executions. Incidentally, the IRA was responsible for more Catholic deaths during the troubles than any other group. The IRA members were terrorists, but we should not forget that they were also criminals specialising in organised crime.”
“They were not beyond reproach—Bloody Sunday is a striking example, I fear—but the massive majority of our soldiers acted with professionalism and restraint in the face of danger. The troubles led to 3,500 deaths and 50,000 injuries. More than 90% of them were caused or brought about by paramilitaries. The British Army’s rules of engagement were clear—governed by the yellow card, which soldiers carry at all times. Soldiers were required to issue a challenge before using force, unless doing so would put them or others in immediate danger. The intent was clear: to protect innocent lives, while allowing the use of lethal force when it was necessary and reasonable. Some 1,400 members of the security forces died in those troubles. They killed approximately 300 terrorists.”
“I believe that, and accordingly I was a fierce critic of the state in, for example, the unlawful killing of Jean Charles de Menezes, the torture of Binyam Mohamed, and the failure to protect and provide justice for the six Catholics who were murdered at Loughinisland in 1994. There is no general exception when the state gets it wrong. Justice must, by definition, be fair and practical, and I am afraid the findings of the Northern Ireland coroner on the Clonoe incident were neither. To understand the significance of this inquest ruling, we must consider the context. Operation Banner was the British Army’s longest deployment, spanning from 1969 to 2007. More than 300,000 soldiers served sequentially in Northern Ireland, and despite immense challenges, the British Army performed admirably.”
“May I start by thanking the Secretary of State? The public will not necessarily know that it is very unusual for the Secretary of State to respond to an Adjournment debate, and his presence here demonstrates how important this is and how seriously he takes the task. It also brings back fond memories for me, but that is another matter. I hope that every Member of Parliament elected to this House believes that upholding justice should be our first priority as a Parliament. The right to life is the first among the rights we should uphold. That justice, and that right, should be even handed, and there should be no exception for agents of the state.”
“The car escaped and was then set on fire, and the fire services were kept away from it while it burned out—another standard IRA tactic to destroy forensic evidence. I am afraid that this ruling exposes the double standards that have plagued the legacy of the troubles.”
“All of this was countered by the claim that no bullet casings were found on the ground in the car park, but a number were found in the lorry, and one of the cars present appeared to have had a general-purpose machine gun and an AKM on board. If those weapons were fired from inside a car, there would of course have been no casings on the ground in the car park. Instead, GPMG live ammunition and disintegrating links were found in that car, as well as an AKM casing from a rifle other than those recovered, implying that a fourth AKM had been fired from the car. The car had all its seats other than the driver’s laid flat, which was standard practice for the IRA when using a hatchback as a weapons platform.”
“Without any forensic evidence, it was attributed to a ricochet, which implausibly would have required the round to go through a 180° change of direction. Soldier G heard the exchange of gunfire and saw a soldier go down, which “confirmed my belief that the terrorists were shooting at us”. There was also an interview taken by the Garda, in the Republic of Ireland, of one of the IRA drivers, who said he could not understand why his colleagues had opened fire. He had been in a position in which he was able to judge where the fire was coming from and obviously believed that it was from his own side. He refused to sign the interview notes, presumably when he considered the consequences for him back home of giving away such critical data.”
“I am afraid it all sounds just a bit improbable. The forensics specialist did not actually arrive until two hours and 45 minutes after the action, at a scene contaminated by firemen, police, soldiers and other staff—indeed, she complained about that very contamination. Against the forensic specialist’s views, we must take the observations of soldiers on the ground and other evidence. Four soldiers reported seeing flashes from the back of the lorry, which they interpreted as muzzle flashes. We are not talking about inexperienced soldiers: they would know what they were looking at. Two soldiers heard rounds striking the ground to their right, near the hedgerow where the SAS was hiding. The forensic examiner documented bullet strike marks on the hedgerow. One soldier received a bullet wound to the face that knocked him to the ground.”
“It was a terrible weapon, and capturing it before it could be used to kill more people was an important part of the SAS tasking. The judge accepted assertions that the IRA weapons all had their safety catches engaged. Frankly, if that were true, there was no way at all for the SAS commander or the troops to know that at the beginning of the fight. In fact, how likely was that? Let us take the DShK, which the forensic examiner said had its working parts forward, with no round in the chamber. The gun was mounted on a lorry that had just been driven back at breakneck speed from Coalisland in a few minutes. During the few minutes of that journey back, getting the gun into the state described would have required nine actions, some of which require two hands, while hanging on to the side of a lurching truck.”
“I find it hard to imagine a more clearcut case that allows firing without challenge, but in his ruling the judge ignored several significant facts and appears to have been naive in his view of others. His selection of facts appears to be extremely partial. For example, the judge made much of the SAS’s use of armour-piercing bullets, but he made no mention of the fact that the anti-aircraft gun the IRA was using fired armour-piercing incendiary rounds five times the size of any rifle bullets, or the fact that they could be fired at a rate of 600 to 1,200 rounds a minute. Those bullets can pierce concrete walls or shoot down aircraft at a mile range. The machine gun had just been deployed and could have eliminated the entire SAS patrol in a matter of seconds.”
“That is doubly so when one remembers that this band of killers had just attempted to murder many policemen and had returned in a high state of excitement, pumped up with adrenalin and firing their weapons in the air. Secondly, the fact that the SAS commander did not know where they all were meant that his issuing a challenge could expose his entire troop to a lethal crossfire. Remember: this was happening on a dark February night at about 10.45 pm. Issuing a challenge under those circumstances could have amounted to collective suicide. Circumstances such as that are precisely why the yellow card rules allow a soldier to fire without challenge when the danger is too great.”
“They did not know how many terrorists there were, but they assumed that there could be up to 20. They did not know how many vehicles there were or how many weapons were in the other cars. That creates a number of problems for issuing a challenge, which is the first option under the yellow card system. While it may be reasonable to stand up and issue a challenge to either one terrorist or a small number of terrorists who could be seen and covered while they respond, the circumstance is completely different when there is an unknown number of antagonists in an unknown number of cars with an unknown number of weapons. The probability of one of 20, let us say, deciding to fire on the soldiers is much higher, particularly when that individual may be out of sight of the patrol.”
“The soldiers then stood up, advanced on the occupants of the lorry and three other vehicles in the car park with the lorry, and opened fire. Four IRA members were shot dead, four were wounded, one of whom was arrested at the scene and, notably, given first aid by the soldiers, and others fled in cars. Now we come forward to February 2025, when Mr Justice Michael Humphreys ruled that the use of lethal force by the SAS in this incident was unlawful. The ruling is demonstrably wrong and ignores the plain facts of the case. The SAS soldiers operated under the control of the police force, and the operation was carried out with police officers in close proximity. They faced heavily armed terrorists who had just carried out an attack on a police station—lethally, for all they knew.”
“The gunfire could clearly be heard and the tracer bullets were observed by the SAS patrol in the car park at Clonoe. After a minute or two, the soldiers heard another burst of gunfire. The soldiers, of course, did not know that that was simply bravado. For all they and their commander knew, hiding behind their hedge, the murder gang were engaging other soldiers or other policemen. Within a minute, the lorry appeared out of the darkness, driven at breakneck speed, lurching around corners and with its engine screaming in too low a gear. As it drove into the car park, the IRA truck’s headlights illuminated the SAS position behind the hedgerow. At that point, the soldiers did not know whether they had been spotted.”
“At 7.40 pm on that dark February night, 12 members of the SAS were in position on the boundary of the Clonoe chapel car park, behind the hedgerow. The soldiers observed the movements of five cars in and out of the car park. They were assumed to be reconnaissance vehicles scouting out the car park for the lorry to which the DShK was to be attached. However, the intelligence briefing was wrong—an error that ended up creating chaos and extreme danger. Instead, at around 22:40 hours, the lorry-mounted DShK was used to attack the Coalisland police station. Sixty rounds were fired at close range from the DShK and from the Kalashnikovs. As the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) said, the attackers’ intent was clear: to kill police officers. They were all would-be murderers; of that, there can be no doubt.”
“Perhaps more notably in this context, some had shotguns loaded with alternate rounds designed to smash windscreens and deliver tear gas to immobilise the drivers and stop the vehicles. The soldiers also carried caltrops to wreck the tyres of vehicles attempting to escape. The armour-piercing rounds that the judge referred to could penetrate body armour, but their primary purpose in this context was to penetrate the engine blocks of the vehicles and stop them. The equipment was all designed to stop escape and allow arrest—that is the key point. The plan was to close in on the IRA operatives and to arrest them as they assembled and mounted the heavy machine gun on to the vehicle in the chapel car park.”
“The intelligence indicated that the attack would be mounted from the Clonoe chapel car park, so the SAS commander’s plan was to arrest the terrorists as they formed up at the car park, preventing the attack on the police station altogether and seizing the heavy machine gun. The commander did not know how many terrorists, vehicles or weapons would be involved, but it was thought that as many as 20 IRA members could be involved. The troop sergeant assessed the rather straggly hedge line adjacent to the car park to be the only suitable position where partial concealment was possible, but it notably did not provide cover from gunfire. The SAS team carried the standard Heckler & Koch G3K rifle and one soldier had a general purpose machine gun.”
“A former member of the Ulster Defence Regiment, Derek Ferguson, was murdered in 1991, also at Coagh. An attack against Glenanne barracks on 31 May 1991 left three soldiers dead. It is also thought that some of their members were involved in the Derryard attack in 1989, notably using a heavy machine gun, probably the DShK we will see later in this story, to kill two British soldiers. In February 1992, the RUC special branch found out that the IRA was planning a number of attacks on 15 and 16 February. It had information that an IRA team, armed with a 12.7 mm Soviet DShK heavy machine gun and three Kalashnikov rifles, would attack the Coalisland police station.”
“The hon. Member is exactly right, and he prefaces what I intend to say. He repeats the point that his party leader made in the urgent question, when he said that the judgment was ultra vires. I believe the right hon. Gentleman was right in that, although I leave that to the lawyers. To answer the rest of the question from the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon), we have to return to the actual facts of the Clonoe incident. The self-styled East Tyrone brigade was one of the most active Provisional IRA units. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, it undertook a surge of activity, pursuing a Maoist-style murder strategy. I think it was called Lynagh’s strategy at the time. In August 1988, eight soldiers were killed by a Provisional IRA bomb at Ballygawley. On 7 March 1989, two Protestants were shot dead at a garage in Coagh.”
“These persecutions are conducted decades after the fact, without any new evidence being presented to give reason for the reopening of cases. After the action, everybody involved was questioned thoroughly to establish the facts—what the intelligence was, what the arrest plans were, and what happened. On the basis of that questioning, on 15 October 1992—with the evidence close to hand and the events fresh in the witnesses’ minds, and when investigation of everything was possible—the police and the Director of Public Prosecutions for Northern Ireland concluded that there should be no prosecution of the soldiers. There was no case to answer.”
“My right hon. Friend makes a very good point. Of course, he is the Member for Hereford, so many of the people who have retired and will face these threats will be his constituents. He and I are long-standing supporters of human rights in this country, and have both defended article 2, for example, but this case is a misuse of article 2. The people who wrote the European convention on human rights were recently out of the second world war—they did not write it to be interpreted in this way. He has made a double point. Returning to my right hon. Friend’s point about the IRA, since the events in question, the Good Friday agreement has allowed for the release of convicted terrorists in order to achieve an end to the bloodshed. I guess we all agree with that, yet we continue to persecute those who fought against the terrorists.”
“Most of them say in those letters that they support human rights, but they do more than that; they guarantee those rights for the rest of us. Let me end by quoting the words of Charles Province, the American soldier and poet: “It is the soldier, not the reporter, who has given us the freedom of the press. It is the soldier, not the poet, who has given us the freedom of speech. It is the soldier, not the peace camp organiser, who has given us the freedom to demonstrate. It is the soldier, who serves beneath the flag, whose coffin is draped by the flag, who allows the protestor to burn the flag. It is the soldier, not the politician…who has given these freedoms.” These soldiers are the guarantors of our security, our freedom and our justice.”