Sir Bernard Jenkin
MP for Harwich and North Essex · Conservative · United Kingdom
“Despite long and historic disagreements between successive UK Governments and Israel, it has remained a steadfast ally in counter-terrorist efforts to keep our people safe in this country. We are now embarked, it seems, on a full diplomatic dispute with Israel and tit-for-tat expulsions of diplomats.”
“I would very much have liked to have discussed the medical devices questions arising from the Bill. The Minister made an incredibly short speech about that important matter. It is quite clear that these provisions are part of the covert dynamic alignment with the EU and the covert rejoin agenda being pursued by the Government.”
“I am as keen as anybody to get on with discussing the Health Bill, but this topic is too serious an opportunity to miss, given that the hon. Member for Leeds Central and Headingley (Alex Sobel) has raised such important issues. I really commend his speech and his initiative. Everybody should read it.”
“The Minister shakes her head, but she is yet to give a good reason as to why this measure is in the Bill. When we had an Adjournment debate in July with the then Minister for patient safety, the hon.”
“The chief executive of the CQC is wantonly conflicted in terms of looking after the safe space, so he cannot be the one left in charge of that function. The real point here is that we are missing the opportunity to save so much money. Governments keep having public inquiries.”
“I asked the Minister, in a letter I sent her after the debate in July, to give us the information on how much the transfer of all this would cost. Nothing has arrived. I never had a reply to the letter. Of course, the Government have changed the Minister and the new Minister for patient safety, the right hon.”
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“I beg to suggest that, if the Minister had listened carefully to what I said earlier, he would have heard me reading from a letter I had received from Mr Robert Rogers, who made it absolutely clear that it is possible to entrench a Standing Order of this House with its own super-majority. I am astonished that the Government do not understand that, and that the whole basis of this Bill seems to rest once more on the denial of advice given by the Clerks of the House.”
“I am afraid that the Minister has not satisfied me and I do not think that he has satisfied a great many of my colleagues on the Government Benches or in the official Opposition. I want to press the amendment to a vote. Question put, That the amendment be made. The Committee proceeded to a Division.”
“The basis of the Bill—that this has to be done through statute—also remains contested by the Clerks. I doubt that we will win the vote in the Committee this afternoon, but the Minister has failed to give a full response or to acknowledge any of the points that have been made. His subsection refers to a Speaker’s “certificate under this section”, which is very unspecific. At least the amendment states “Any certificate of the Speaker of the House of Commons given under this section shall be conclusive for all purposes”. That word “any” and the reference to the Speaker make it clear that whatever the Speaker issues is uncontested, rather than leave it open to the courts to determine whether the certificate presented by the Speaker complies with the legislation.”
“Not only is the principle of specifying majorities already written into the Standing Orders of the House, but in the past the House has also required a relative majority for reaching decision.” My hon. Friend the Minister also dismissed the comments that I read from Mr Robert Rogers, the Clerk Assistant and Director General, who made it clear that we can not only write into our Standing Orders provisions requiring super-majorities, but entrench a— [ Interruption. ] I am rather distressed that the Minister is not even listening to what I am saying. We can entrench a Standing Order with its own super-majority so that it could be removed only by a super-majority, if that is what the House chose to do. The whole basis of the Government’s advice remains contested by the Clerks.”
“He goes on to say: “As these would become justiciable questions, the courts could be drawn into matters of acute political controversy.” The Minister has not responded with anything substantive to defeat that advice. Moreover, the Minister has rested his justification for the Bill on the assertion that it would not be possible to write these provisions into the Standing Orders, which would be automatically immune. Let me read from the Clerk’s memorandum again. He said that “a Standing Order regulating the matters in the Bill could provide for its staying in effect unless repealed by a specified majority”, meaning that it could be entrenched, “for example by…equal to or greater than two thirds of the number of seats in the House.”
“I am most grateful, Mr Evans, for the opportunity to reply to the debate. I regret that I feel compelled to press this matter to a vote, but I feel that the Minister’s response has been wholly unconvincing. We are faced with adamant and clear advice from the Clerk of the House that the Minister has chosen to dismiss as irrelevant. Let me remind the Committee what the Clerk said: “The provisions of this subsection make the Speaker’s consideration of confidence motions and the House’s practices justiciable questions for determination by the ordinary courts.” That includes “what constitutes a confidence motion, the selection of amendments to such Motions and the consequences of their being carried”.”
“I cannot understand how Ministers can argue that the Bill takes power away from the Prime Minister and gives it to the House of Commons. In 1979, the intention of the provision would have been to prevent the House causing a general election. The Prime Minister would have been in the driving seat, with 14 days to cook up some kind of new deal to stay in power. How is that taking power away from the Prime Minister?”
“Lion, maybe. I should like to draw the hon. Gentleman’s attention to the fact that the parliamentary Conservative party gave no mandate to the leadership of our party for a fixed-term arrangement of any description. The parliamentary party was consulted about whether there should be a coalition, and whether there should be a commitment to a referendum on the alternative vote, but the question of a fixed-term Parliament was never mentioned. Nobody knew anything about it until it appeared in the coalition agreement.”
“I recognise that my right hon. Friend is dealing with some very serious and potentially disastrous economic circumstances, but when I say, “I told you so,” it is not just about staying out of the euro; I am saying, “I told you we shouldn’t have ratified the Maastricht treaty.” [Laughter.] They are guilty over on the Opposition Benches, too. Will my right hon. Friend be a little clearer? Is he saying that unless we are fully extricated from any potential liability for other eurozone members through the European Union, there will be no treaty change?”
“Is my hon. Friend giving an assurance that not only are there no sanctions—we understand that—but there is absolutely no increase in EU jurisdiction over the British Budget-making process?”
“I am sorry, but I must insist on the Minister giving way again. Is there any increase in EU jurisdiction over the British Budget-making process as a result of these arrangements? Yes or no?”
“Is the hon. Gentleman arguing that somehow these arrangements will give us more influence and more control over the economies of other member states? On that basis, should we therefore not be seeking to enter into arrangements of the same sort with, say, the United States, so that we can control its deficit? The US deficit will have far more effect on our economy than any individual deficit in any individual member state of the EU.”
“Just for the convenience of the House, will the hon. Gentleman explain why the numbers of the documents that he has read out do not correspond with the numbers in the Government’s motion, because those are the documents that we are scrutinising?”
“My right hon. Friend has rightly won admiration for the very difficult settlement that he has had to reach in this review. He is clear from his remarks that the Afghan campaign, which may be costing the British taxpayer up to £8 billion a year, has significantly skewed the shape of the core defence programme. Can this be quantified? Should not those distortions to the core defence programme also be funded from the reserve so that defence policy in the long term is not affected by what we are doing in Afghanistan?”
“My hon. Friend is making some extremely powerful points. Does he agree that the emphasis now seems to have become a competition not between the three services, but between military personnel and civilian personnel? The fact that civilian personnel have given themselves equivalent ranks to military personnel has put them more in direct competition, so that they double up the functions of the armed forces.”
“I have great respect for the way in which the right hon. Gentleman conducted himself as Defence Secretary in very difficult circumstances, but I really do think that he is talking complete rubbish about this. When I last visited Afghanistan, the Americans had already indicated that they were minded to withdraw, and the effect of that was to galvanise the Afghan political process. The stalemate in the Afghan political process has been the main obstacle to progress in Afghanistan. I believe that the Prime Minister made the right announcement, and I have no doubt that my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Defence was properly consulted.”
“Strategic thinking is vital, and we need to examine all the threats, possibilities and opportunities, not just certain threats and contingencies. Within Whitehall we need challenge, with alternatives coming up through the system and people conducting thorough analysis. Ideally, we want a national centre of strategic assessment, protected for secrecy in a similar way to the intelligence services and able to provide a permanent resource to Ministers.”
“If that is the depth of thinking that has gone into an assessment of our national interests, we can hardly expect much coherence from the Government’s documents. The real inconsistency at the heart of all three of the Government’s reviews is the attempt to reconcile what the Foreign Secretary has said about having no strategic shrinkage and expanding our influence on the world stage with the savage defence cuts that will lead to a reduction of one third in our deployable capability. That is what the defence planning assumptions actually show. There has been an attempt to connect the Foreign Secretary’s vision of our foreign policy with the reality of the deficit reduction programme, but it has not been achieved. Our Committee concluded that political strategic leadership is essential if we are to have a coherent national strategy.”
“The words “national interest” are sprinkled liberally throughout the documents. They are mentioned 26 times in the national security strategy and six times in the SDSR, and were even mentioned once by my right hon. Friend the Chancellor in his comprehensive spending review statement—but that was only in connection with justifying the increase in spending on overseas aid. In all those mentions, there is very little definition of what our national interests actually are. When I tabled a parliamentary question to the Prime Minister to ask him, he referred me to paragraph 2.12 of the national security strategy: “Our security, prosperity and freedom are interconnected and mutually supportive. They constitute our national interest.” That is really sub-GCSE stuff.”
“Of course, someone has to have talent to be a great gymnast or a great concert pianist, but they also have to put in the work and the training in order to be successful before they give that first recital. There used to be a six-month civil service course on strategic thinking; at the moment, it consists of one module of one week’s training. That lack of strategy is evident in all the contradictions in the documents. The national security strategy says that it is the first duty of Government to protect our people. Well, that is clearly not so. The first priority of Government is not defence. Health, pensions, schools, the Department for International Development, and even the European Union budget have taken priority over the defence of these islands in the comprehensive spending review.”
“A grand strategy, or a national strategy, is about reconciling all the instruments of statecraft to the main ends of promoting the security, peace and prosperity of the people of these islands. It is evident that both the national security strategy and the defence and security review lack strategic thinking—the consistency of analysis and assessment that is necessary to give them strategic coherence. The problem is that the work simply has not been done, because Whitehall lacks the capacity to do it. There are no people working for the National Security Council or the strategy units of different Departments who are tasked with doing or trained to do such work. Some people say, “Strategists are not trained, they are born”, but that is like saying that a great gymnast is born a gymnast.”
“There is no doubt that the main strategic effort of this Government has to be deficit reduction, but I think that, as far as the Treasury is concerned, it is the Government’s sole strategic effort. To have a sole strategic effort is strategic blindness, not strategy. It may be a necessity to have that imperative driving the whole Government at this time, but other strategic priorities have to be recognised. Strategy is not just about reconciling ends, ways and means. It is not about having a document that is published as a Command Paper and stacked on a shelf afterwards—job done. Strategy is a state of mind. It is a process of thinking that has to be ongoing, has to be done continuously, and has to be continually adapted.”
“In one rather telling piece of evidence, Peter Hennessy, shortly to be ennobled as Lord Hennessy, says that politicians too often reach for the word “vision”, and that we should be ready to excise that word with our red buzzer, because it is an excuse for a politician to disconnect his aspirations and the sunlit uplands that he dreams of from the reality of the world in which he, and the civil servants who have to deliver the policy that he is seeking to deliver, have to live. We found that Whitehall Departments each have their own version of strategy, with their own strategy units, but none of them knows what they are meant to contribute to national strategy, if they even knew what that was. That applies to the Treasury in particular.”
“The evidence, I am afraid, was more disturbing than I had imagined. The word “strategy” itself has become corrupted. It has become a tool of management-speak for consultancies and people who do not really know what they are doing when they use it. We heard evidence from Sir Rob Fry and Commodore Stephen Jermy, who were both involved in decisions in the Ministry of Defence about the deployment to Helmand. They said that it was driven primarily by military concerns, without any strategic thinking going on in Whitehall about the reasons for it or its consequences.”
“As shadow Secretary of State for two years and a member for four years of the Select Committee on Defence, I watched with increasing perplexity post-9/11 our first Afghan deployment, the invasion of Iraq and the subsequent deployment to Helmand, as chaos grew due to policy that was increasingly reactive to events and less and less in control of them. There was increasingly an apparent lack of strategic thinking behind what we were doing. As we started calling for NATO to develop a new strategic concept, I began to ask myself who held the UK’s strategic concept and whether there was one. That was the starting point for the Public Administration Committee’s inquiry once I was elected its Chairman in this Parliament. Our report entitled, “Who does UK National Strategy?” is on the Table and tagged for this debate.”
“I would further underline, as the Secretary of State admitted, that the review has been distorted by our activities and the burden of operations in Afghanistan. To that extent, the review is raiding future capability to sustain current operations, which is an unstrategic approach. I fully accept—I think we have to understand the predicament faced by those on the Treasury Bench—that the Government have inherited a very difficult situation and not just in the Ministry of Defence. Of course the national deficit has to be addressed, but there is a deeper malaise at the heart of the dysfunctional relationship between the Ministry of Defence and the rest of Government and, indeed, in dysfunctional relationships at the MOD.”
“I commend the hon. Member for Bridgend (Mrs Moon) on alighting on a vital capability. There was one thing that she did not say about it: if it were deployed, it would be the envy of the Americans, such is the sophistication of the capability. It is also a valued asset of many of our European NATO allies and I hope that even now, at this eleventh hour, there might be ways to explore how we can share the burden of the capability so that it can be retained. I fear that that underlines how the defence review was done in a rush and that, whatever the thinking in advance, it ended in the inevitable collision between the Ministry of Defence and the Treasury which, as the letter from my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State to the Prime Minister advertised, threatened to be even more destructive than it was.”
“I am grateful for the question, but I will continue. [Interruption.] With respect, that was not the purpose of the Committee’s report. We were not trying to write a national strategy; we were simply trying to advertise the fact that the capacity for developing a coherent national strategy does not exist.”
“It was the advanced research and assessment group, based at Shrivenham, and I am afraid that in March the right hon. Member for Coventry North East as Defence Secretary closed it down, to save £1 million. [Interruption.] It was such a small cut, he did not even realise it was being made. I have no doubt it did not cross his desk. It was shut down because it had made enemies by telling truth to power, and that is the capacity that needs to exist in Whitehall.”
“Economists in particular work in mathematical equations and like tame, predictable problems. Economics is all about prediction and certainty, with the intention of being vindicated by what happens. We live in a world in which problems are not tame but wicked and unpredictable. As we face greater and greater global challenges, we must be more prepared for the unpredictability of the global security, economic and geopolitical environments. We therefore need the capacity for strategy. I shall give a brief example. I gather that after the global banking crisis started, Her Majesty the Queen asked how nobody had seen that it would happen, given that it was so big. The answer is that one body did foresee a global banking collapse being a major security threat to the UK.”
“The right hon. Gentleman asks an interesting question, which has been raised with me before. There are two reasons why politicians fear such a challenge. The first is that politicians who are busy running their Departments do not like people running into their offices with contrary ideas and imperatives. The other reason is that if they ask for alternatives to be developed, they say, “Whatever you do, don’t put it on to a piece of paper and don’t e-mail it to anybody, in case it leaks out.” We are embarked on a deficit reduction programme that depends on a certain economic out-turn. I just hope that the Treasury has run through the alternative plans B, C and D, in case things do not turn out as we expect. The problem is that we have got into the habit of thinking in closed systems.”
“Is my right hon. Friend aware that earlier today, the Downing street spokesman described the agreements as being about “our strategic partnership” with France? Does he agree that a little modesty about them would be in order, and that we cannot have a strategic fusion with a country that has historically had, and still has, diametrically different strategic objectives on the world stage? We had better recognise the primacy of the relationship with the United States.”
“May I congratulate my right hon. Friend on publishing a very useful card showing the dates of the sitting days of this Parliament, as well as the recess dates, for many months ahead? I congratulate him on this tremendous innovation. It gives me great satisfaction that this has been introduced not by some manic young moderniser but by a true Conservative who was educated at Eton and Oxford.”
“It is inevitable, of course, that individual Departments will have to set out the costs of redundancies, and it is right that they should do so in due course. However, will my right hon. Friend set out how much extra interest the Government would have to pay, and therefore how much more public spending would have to be cut in future, if we did not start to make such economies now?”
“May I remind my hon. Friend that those of us who opposed the formation of the euro in principle warned that it would be a disaster, and that we have been vindicated by events? May I warn him now that the Government’s aspiration somehow to assist in creating a stable and strong euro area will be a vain attempt? The Government had better plan for the continuing disaster of a currency without a state, which is bound to be unstable in the long term.”
“May I thank my right hon. Friend for his statement and for his determination to keep the House regularly updated? As Chair of the Public Administration Committee, I welcome that evidence of better governance of our effort in this conflict, but what exactly is the role of the National Security Council in the governance of the conflict? Why did the Government drop the proposal that I suggested to my right hon. Friend, then Leader of the Opposition and now the Prime Minister, that there should be a war cabinet—a smaller group of Ministers meeting more regularly on a cross-departmental basis—to ensure daily supervision of the conflict?”
“Member for Rhondda is right to say that we need ambassadors for Britain, representing both Parliament and Government, but I simply do not believe that to be true of all Departments. Do we need more Ministers to represent the Government in this House? It was suggested to our Committee that Whips speak for the Government in the other place, so why cannot Whips speak on behalf of the Government in this place? Why do they have to remain mute and silent here, as if they had no views of their own and no speaking purpose in a House of whose being speaking is the very essence?”
“We must send this signal that we take our jobs seriously and that we are not going to be seduced, cajoled or flattered into accepting the Executive agenda more and more. I end with this point. My hon. Friend the Member for Broxbourne, who moved his new clause so ably, is a member of the Public Administration Committee, which produced the report “Too Many Ministers?” in the last Parliament. I am afraid that I have to inform the Government that we have already launched a new inquiry, asking “What do Ministers do?”. That might seem a cheeky question, but at this time when there are so many Ministers, we know from the revelations in various biographies that Parliamentary Under-Secretaries have jobs and activities created for them to keep them busy. When it comes to the Foreign Office, I have no doubt that the hon.”
“If we are to improve the way in which we do our job, will we be helped if we allow the Government, of whichever party, to have patronage over and to give hope to a wider and wider group of Members, and to instil into the principle of politics in this House that the be-all and end-all is ministerial office? Would that be conducive to a more accountable system? We do not have the separation of powers in our system, but we nevertheless rely on a degree of separation between the Executive and the legislature. I submit that the new clause is exactly the signal about our determination to hold the Executive to account that the House needs to send not only to the Government of the day but to the people at large.”
“What really came through in that episode was how useless Parliament had become. What is Parliament’s job? It is to ensure that the laws of this country are fit for purpose, to stand up for the liberty of the citizen and to control the supply of money to the Government. Looking at those three tests, we can see that the House has performed miserably over the past decade. More and more legislation, particularly secondary legislation, is passed that is unfit for purpose and not scrutinised properly. The House has completely failed to control the massive growth in public expenditure that has led to the deficit crisis that we now face, and as for protecting the liberties of the individual, I am afraid I think that most of our constituents would feel that the House has been found wanting.”
“Members who were first elected in the 1950s would have served in one or both of the world wars, and virtually every Member of Parliament at that time had done national service of one sort or another. That Edwardian deference has gone from today’s politics, however, and Governments will have to accept that the House of Commons is becoming more assertive. An example can be seen in the whole expenses debacle. I refuse to call it a scandal, because what the newspapers uncovered was much less a scandal in respect of individuals and much more a scandal in terms of the system that had developed, in which the press itself had connived. The outcome of the expenses debacle sent a message to everyone that it was time for Parliament to reassert its role, and it seemed that the party leaders took that message up.”
“I am not quite as old and wise as my noble Friend Lord Heseltine, who sat for many years in this place, and who I saw opining, at the very formation of the coalition, that there was no such thing as the new politics; there was only the old politics, and politics would always be the same. That is of course true, but if the new politics is going to mean an increase in the domination of the Executive in the House of Commons, that would seem to be the antithesis of what those who coined the phrase were seeking to convey. In fact, politics is changing. When I was first elected in 1992 there was still quite a strong element of deference in the House of Commons towards authority and the Whips.”
“It is worth reflecting on the fact that as we have grown the number of Ministers in this place, we have left Whips and even Parliamentary Private Secretaries to speak for the Government in the other place, because Governments are so interested in filling ministerial offices with Members of Parliament, to secure their influence in this place. However, if there were more Ministers in the other place, there is no reason why they should not be invited to the Bar of the House to answer questions. That reform is long overdue. There are plenty of alternatives. I should like to reflect on the term “the new politics” that has crept into political parlance.”
“Member for Foyle (Mark Durkan), who spoke just before me, that it is possible to appoint more Members from the other place. It is also possible to appoint more special advisers—and let us face it—we have a rash of special advisers in Government these days compared with what we used to have. There are all kinds of ways both of ensuring that there are ambassadors for the Government in office and people to implement the Government’s policy and political direction, and of ensuring that the Government remain accountable to the House. Ministers do not need to be Members of the House in order to be accountable to it.”
“There is a simple test that we need to apply to this Bill, and to new clause 7 in particular, which is: does it strengthen the House of Commons? It was axiomatic before the election, and in the aftermath of the expenses scandal, as the hon. Gentleman pointed out, that every party leader should speak in grand terms about the need to strengthen the accountability of Government and to strengthen the House of Commons. Can the Bill do that? It cannot, unless we reduce the number of Ministers pro rata to the reduction in the number of MPs. I should point out that my remarks are not some manic attack on the power of Government. There are plenty of ways in which Governments can appoint people to jobs in order to get things done. Indeed, I should say to the hon.”
“I am waiting with bated breath to see how he melds the previous position of his party’s leader with the present position of the Government. While he is preparing his remarks, I hope that he will reflect on the fact that the very office of Deputy Leader of the House is, in itself, rather a modern invention. I think that it was invented during the previous Labour Government. I do not know whether it ever existed before—I look to my hon. Friend the Father of the House—because it had never been deemed necessary for there to be a deputy to the Leader— [ Interruption. ] The hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) was the embodiment of the invention. The post reflected the desire of the Executive to create more jobs for the boys—if I may put it that way—than existed before.”
“I rise briefly to congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Broxbourne (Mr Walker) on the spirited and coherent way in which he moved his new clause. I should also like to congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Richmond Park (Zac Goldsmith), who also made a coherent and spirited defence of the new clause. It is not my intention to speak for very long. In fact, it had not been my intention to speak at all in this debate, partly because I am losing my voice, so this speech might not continue for long. In fact, it might be cut down in its prime. However, I have been watching the Deputy Leader of the House nodding at some interesting moments during this debate, when he seemed to be endorsing the past statements of his party’s leader.”
“I can put them right. As Chairman of that Committee, although I do not act as Chairman in this capacity, I will be in the Aye Lobby myself on new clause 7. As my hon. Friend the Member for Broxbourne said, it represents a very modest maintenance of the status quo. That is what this is about—checking an advance or a further incursion of the Executive into the House of Commons. It is a holding position, while my Committee completes its work.”
“I commend my right hon. Friend’s determination to adopt a more thoughtful and strategic approach. Has he had a chance to read the Public Administration Committee’s report “Who does UK National Strategy?”, in which the outgoing Chief of the Defence Staff commented that the UK had “lost an institutionalised capacity for, and culture of, strategic thought”? Does my right hon. Friend agree that we need a more co-ordinated approach to strategic thinking across Whitehall, and will he adopt the report’s recommendations?”
“That would be completely fair and equal, and would provide a safety valve, because there would be no possibility of information going out about which one campaign could cry foul.”