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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“Ultimately, we need a new House of Commons with fresh blood and a fresh mandate to reclaim the rights and powers that should not be the property of our rulers but belong to the people, and should be safeguarded in this House by the representatives they send here to safeguard their freedoms.”
“Mine is written every time I stand in front of my constituents for re-election. Some day, this House must demand back from Government what successive Governments have taken away. A competent Government need a strong Parliament to hold them accountable, and there is certainly no evidence that weaker Parliaments have made Governments any better. The Justice Secretary perhaps started a process of reversal with his concession about clause 6, but he will need to make many, many more concessions before the Bill wins my confidence. I shall certainly vote against the time limit on consideration of the Bill, which exemplifies everything that has gone wrong with the governance of our nation.”
“As the right hon. Member for Birkenhead (Mr. Field) pointed out, the unworkable requirements for the declaration of outside interests are not neutral but designed to cow MPs by creating a sense that outside earnings are invidious. The role of MP need not be a full-time job—as has been asked, how else do so many MPs also have time to serve as Ministers? MPs are becoming more like party drones than independent tribunes of the people. They should be representatives, not party delegates. They should represent their constituency at Westminster, not their Westminster party in their constituency. MPs today are expected to behave more and more as employees of some kind of corporation, not to exercise their individual judgment according to conscience. That is why we should not have a job description.”
“It is ironic, at a time when everyone seems to agree that the House of Commons has become too weak and the Government too strong, that the Government should bring forward this Bill to regulate Parliament with a new quango, new criminal offences specific to MPs and, according to the Clerk of the House, new limitations on parliamentary privilege that will have what he calls a “chilling effect” on free speech. The Bill of Rights of 1689 came about as a reaction to a long period of monarchical rule during which Parliament was either ignored or did not sit at all. It limited the royal prerogative and established key rights for Parliament, not least the right of free speech. This Bill threatens to turn the clock back, not forward, and to put MPs more in fear of the apparatus of the modern state, not make them stronger or more independent.”
“Friend the Member for North-West Hampshire (Sir George Young) pointed out, graphically underlines the disparity in power that now exists between Parliament and the Executive whom we are meant to be holding to account. With Parliament so powerless, the voters share that sense of powerlessness. It fuels the anger and outrage about our expenses, the failure of the whole political class, the loss of control over issues such as immigration, the reams of meaningless and unaccountable laws, the endless taxation and waste and the untouchable tyranny of officialdom. That is why the British National party now wins seats in European elections.”
“Only the Government determine the timetable for the House’s business, only the Government have the power to determine changes to Standing Orders, and only the Government can table a motion to suspend the time limit on sittings. Before the second world war, the Government payroll was perhaps a little more than 50 MPs, and a sitting MP who accepted ministerial office was subject to what today’s radicals would call “recall”—that is, they had to resign and fight their seat in a by-election. Today, the payroll has nearly trebled to more than 140 MPs, and ministerial office is just one of the bribes and threats that a modern Prime Minister can hold over MPs without consequence. The proposal for the regulation of MPs without the regulation of Ministers, as my right hon.”
“Ministers have become legislators in their own right, not least when they sit in the EU Council of Ministers. More and more public money is voted through without any semblance of debate. At the state opening of Parliament, we slam the door of our House in the face of the sovereign’s messenger to signal the hard-fought independence of the House of Commons from the Crown, but these days such a ceremony is becoming an ironic charade, as today’s Prime Ministers have more unfettered power and control over Parliament than any monarch for at least 300 years. The powers of the Crown are vested in the Prime Minister, and he virtually controls Parliament.”
“I invite the Justice Secretary to listen to my arguments. The Bill further undermines MPs’ independent capacity to represent the interests of their constituents in the national interest. As the Justice Secretary said, the House of Commons already sits shorter and shorter hours. Recesses seem to get longer and more numerous. An increasing number of decisions are taken other than in Parliament—in Whitehall, in Brussels, or in the courts, and increasingly not even in our own courts. Legislation increasingly passes through the House of Commons without being scrutinised, this Bill being a case in point, as my hon. Friend the Member for Chichester remarked. Ministers have more and more order-making powers, and there is more and more delegated legislation.”
“I should like to share an irony with my hon. Friend. Whereas Back-Bench Members of Parliament with outside interests are certainly not working against the interests of the House of Commons, Ministers with such interests are certainly doing so a lot of the time, because they are denying us information and legislating to try to keep us in our box.”
“Will my hon. and learned Friend confirm whether, if I were to compliment an hon. Member on the way in which he represented an interest in this House and if someone used that as evidence of an example of a misdeclared, wrongly declared or undeclared interest, that Member could be prosecuted under the Bill even though I intended it as a compliment?”
“The Parliamentary Standards Bill is, by any standard, an extremely important constitutional measure, yet the deliberations on it are being confined to a mere three days. That means that there will be only 18 hours of debate before it passes through all its stages in this House. Would this House not earn a bit more respect if we delayed the rising of the House for the recess to enable the Government to give more days of debate to this extremely important Bill? By no stretch of the imagination will it be possible to debate every clause and amendment next week.”
“May I put it to the right hon. Gentleman that, notwithstanding all the expertise that he has mentioned, he has not mentioned any expertise within Whitehall in relation to the considerable dislocation between Departments, which contributed to the lack of a plan at the time? The Foreign Secretary has not properly answered the point raised by the hon. Member for Cannock Chase (Dr. Wright), or the point about evidence being given on oath. I appreciate that he has made a lot of concessions in terms of the original proposal, but is not the present proposal for an inquiry really just a mess, and should he not withdraw it, and instead consult properly with the Opposition parties and move forward with a proper consensus?”
“Under this Bill, who will be legally responsible for ensuring that fish stocks are not over-exploited, and whom can the citizens sue for the collapse in fish stocks and the denigration of the marine environment?”
“Is the Secretary of State aware that the WWF tried to mount a prosecution against the failure of the CFP, but that there is no locus for any non-governmental organisation to sue anybody for the failure of the CFP to conserve fish stocks? Is that not a complete and abject denial of accountability?”
“Can my hon. Friend enlighten the House a little about the debate in the other place? The Minister there said that “our intention is to designate marine conservation zones for conservation purposes and not for fisheries management.” —[ Official Report, House of Lords, 15 December 2008; Vol. 706, c. 727.] Given that indiscriminate fishing does so much damage to the marine environment, is that statement not a bit of an illogicality? Are the Government trying to avoid a collision between the Bill and the common fisheries policy?”
“As I work around the Essex coast in my constituency, there is a sense of doom and decline about the bird life, and the vibrancy of the marine ecology and the vulnerability of those who live off it. Unless the Bill strengthens the environmental imperative and has at its heart a scientific assessment of the vulnerability of the marine ecology, it will fail in its primary objective.”
“That flies in the face of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe’s Aarhus convention, which was intended to set down minimum standards on access to environmental information, public participation in decision making and access to justice in environmental issues. That raises a fundamental question that goes to the heart of the purpose of the Bill. Who owns the fish? Who owns the marine environment that we are seeking to protect? Who is liable for its degradation? Who is accountable for neglecting to stop its destruction and decline? As a boy, I grew up regularly being taken to the west coast of Scotland, to sail in that remarkable part of the world. Even during my lifetime, a sense has grown that the bird life and sea life and the fecundity of the sea there are a shadow of their former selves.”
“I close with some remarks about the judgment in the European Court of Justice that I raised with the Secretary of State during his opening remarks. The WWF launched a court action, appealing that the cod quotas had been set not according to scientific advice but according to political pressures in the North sea. The Court ruled that even though the WWF is represented on the North sea regional advisory committee, it had no locus standi to represent what the Court called a “sufficient interest” in the decision that it sought to challenge. That means that environmental organisations that should be able to act in the name of the citizen have no means of challenging the legality of the EU’s decisions about fish. No other Government in the world are so utterly immune to legal challenge in that way.”
“The issue is of massive consequence; a third of the world’s population is fed on fish. Were the fish stocks of the world to collapse, there would be an immediate security and international humanitarian crisis. “The End of the Line” has been described as the marine conservationists’ equivalent of Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth”. It has been shown all over the country, including at Harwich’s Electric Palace cinema in my constituency. It has also been shown all over London and the rest of the country. Unless we address the agenda raised by that remarkable film, we will rue the day. It is a call to arms to the citizens of the world to hold the politicians accountable for the destruction of life in our seas—life on which our own well-being ultimately depends.”
“The film describes how that level was reached some 15 years ago, although we never realised it. The Chinese bureaucrats were lying about how much fish the Chinese had caught year after year. In fact, the total global fish catch is now in structural decline because fish stocks have been so over-exploited. More and more effective means of catching fish ensure that every year we catch a higher and higher proportion of the fish that are left. As my hon. Friend pointed out, scientists estimate that, on current trends, there will be virtually no fish left in the sea by 2048. That will have many consequences for the marine environment and global warming. Believe it or not, the defecation of fish puts alkaline into the sea, increasing its carbon absorption qualities. If we remove the fish, the sea will cease to absorb so much carbon dioxide.”
“However, I hope that it will be a step towards making politicians more accountable for how they treat the public seas. Conservation should be the highest priority for the Government and the fishing industry; indeed, the interests of conservation and the fishing industry should go hand in hand to ensure the future of our marine habitat and the livelihoods of those who rely on it. I urge people to watch “The End of the Line”, the compelling but sobering film by my constituent Charles Clover, who wrote a book of the same title. It sets out how mankind is simply fishing our seas, species by species, to complete extinction. As my hon. Friend the Member for Arundel and South Downs (Nick Herbert) said earlier, we have become used to talking about “peak oil” in energy policy, but we have already passed “peak fish”.”
“However, I fear that the licensing regime being introduced for recreational fishermen is acting as a deterrent. Furthermore, so many of the bass are caught by netsmen. That reduces the size of the fish, and it is their size that is of particular attraction to sport fishermen. A more enlightened approach would recognise that the commercial fishermen are not the only interests to be addressed; the recreational fishermen represent a legitimate interest, and one that is perhaps more consonant with the conservation of stock. Beyond the North Essex test, there is a wider, national—or even international—test for the Bill. It is whether it will challenge the failure of the common fisheries policy. The Bill applies only up to the 6 mile limit; it does not address the whole of the cod crisis in the North sea, for example.”
“I am disappointed that the Minister in another place seemed to be saying that the marine conservation zones should not be used for fishery management and protection. If they are not used for those purposes, one of the main points of the Bill will be missed. The North Essex test of the Bill is whether the sustainability of the inshore fisheries is protected and improved; only then will Essex fishermen and their successors enjoy a sustainable industry. The Bill must also provide for recreational fishing, which I believe is one of the most unsung and under-exploited generators of employment and tourism income in the Essex area. The potential for sea bass fishing off the Essex coast, for example, is enormous and it could provide huge benefit to the area.”
“The practice encourages overfishing—if the quota is not used up, it is lost—and imposes unnecessary penalties on fishermen as a result. The inshore fishery around Essex requires nurturing and protection. In particular, the hatching grounds of the native Colchester oyster in the outer Blackwater estuary need more specific protection than they have enjoyed historically. Historically, the oyster beds where the young oysters are brought on are protected by ancient several orders and specific leases from the Crown Estate to the oyster fishermen. However, they dredge their young oysters from well outside that area, an area that is vulnerable to indiscriminate trawling and fishing and requires protection. Perhaps there is a case for marine conservation zones to provide such protection.”
“The Essex coast still supports a fishing industry, and in my constituency oysters remain extremely important to the local economy and to our cultural heritage. My objective is the survival of the non-sector fishing industry—commercial vessels which, although measuring less than 10 metres, require the allocation of fishing quota under the European Union common fisheries policy—and the survival of the native oyster industry. In fact, the two industries are mutually dependent. Oyster fishermen have traditionally supplemented their oyster catch by catching other fish outside the oyster season. Owing to the restriction on 10-metre vessels, that now requires an additional licence, which in turn requires a minimum amount of fish to be caught regardless of other activities that may be undertaken.”
“This is an important Bill. It has been long in the gestation, but is welcome and, I believe, addresses many issues that are of enormous potential benefit to the communities on our coasts and to the environment. It will have major consequences for my constituency. North Essex is a largely coastal constituency which includes the southern shore of the Stour estuary, the southern shore of the Tendring Hundred, the Colne estuary and all the associated tidal creeks and Mersea island, off the Essex coast at the mouth of the Blackwater estuary, which will be familiar to the Secretary of State. Perhaps I should, like the Secretary of State, declare a very minor interest. My wife owns a little beach house on the Essex coast, although I shall not be dealing with the matters of coastal access that might make that interest relevant.”
“While the Foreign Secretary reflects on the fact that if he walks down the street he is unlikely to meet more than one in 20 who voted Labour in the European elections, may I ask to what he ascribes the declining turnouts in European elections? Why are all the people of Europe more and more disillusioned about participating in elections to the European Parliament? Is it because they are feeling more and more disconnected from institutions which are taking more and more of their power?”
“Can the Foreign Secretary explain how the EU or the member states can give legal guarantees to the Irish Republic without changing the terms of the treaty and requiring re-ratification?”
“If there is a large increase in the number of people infected by swine flu, as we seem now to be anticipating, the national flu pandemic service will be the only means of distributing antiviral drugs. Why is that service not already up and running, as was intended? What has gone wrong with the BT contract? Will the Secretary of State give a clear explanation? What does he mean by “the autumn”?”
“On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. May I point out that Front Benchers took 31 minutes to make their opening statements and ask questions, so you inevitably had to curtail the few Back Benchers who are present in our questions? I understand that, but will you and Mr. Speaker look into whether Front-Bench contributions should be formally time limited?”
“In the emphasis that the British and the Americans are placing on persuading the Afghan people to accept the Afghan constitution, are we not still in danger of imposing too much of a western style of government on to a country to which that is completely alien? Should we not be doing more to work for reconciliation towards more traditional forms of Afghan government in order that we alienate less the tribal institutional structures, particularly in the provinces?”
“The problem is that the Bonn constitution was constructed perhaps rather artificially at a time when a large part of the Taliban community of Afghanistan was not involved. The whole Karzai Administration have little support among the Pashtun majority, who were excluded from that constitutional settlement. Do not we need to allow the Afghan people more collectively to reframe a constitution that is more in line with their own history and tradition?”
“Yesterday, a Ministry of Defence spokesman confirmed that a British frigate had intervened on pirates off the gulf of Aden who had rocket-propelled grenades in their boats and clearly intended to commit crimes on the high seas, but said that because they were not caught in the act, although the Royal Navy could destroy the weaponry, it had to let them go. Clearly, there is a deficiency in international law or its interpretation, or there is something wrong with our rules of engagement. It cannot be right that pirates, who were caught virtually red-handed, are let go.”
“I do not think that the Secretary of State is addressing the point. Why in that particular case did the rules of engagement require pirates to be released, not taken to Kenya, according to the agreement? What is the legal situation that prevents the captain of a British warship from detaining those people and handing them over to the Kenyan Government?”
“I want to refer to the hon. Gentleman’s earlier point about the timing of the debate. My hon. Friend the Member for Woodspring (Dr. Fox) suggested that the debate was taking place now because the Government regard it as unimportant. Perhaps it is because they regard this debate as so important and yet embarrassing, because of the failures of Government policy, that they have decided to put it on this day.”
“Staying with the theme of the public’s attitude towards defence spending, we in the House of Commons should have learned in recent weeks how neglecting an issue can engulf us in public rage. Neglect of this particular issue may be fine in peacetime and when we are deploying our troops in faraway and little-understood battles, but if we require our armed forces to do something at short notice that they are not capable of doing and it results in disaster, we need to be aware that the wrath of the British people over our neglect will be unimaginable—and we will deserve it.”
“That is not a criticism of right hon. and hon. Members; as we know, a very great many, if not all, care deeply about the matter. However, given that the Chamber is so empty this afternoon, there is something wrong with the mechanism used to discuss these things.”
“I echo my hon. Friend the Member for Reigate (Mr. Blunt) and join the chorus of disapproval for the lamentable state of this debate and its timing. I invite the House to reflect on what we face at this moment in the Afghan conflict. I have in front of me the Op Herrick casualty and fatality tables, issued by DASA—Defence Analytical Services and Advice—up to halfway through May. I shall not dwell morbidly on the numbers, but this year is likely to be worse than last year. The rate of casualties this year so far is higher than at the same point last year; on the current trend, we will have more casualties this year than in any year since the conflict began. The fact that there is only a handful of colleagues from both sides of the House in this debate sends a lamentable message about how much the House cares about the issue.”
“That seems to be where the weight of Taliban power is concentrated. It is where they are based and from where they launch their operations. The war in the Swat valley may be the conflict that turns the war in the whole region, in Pakistan and Afghanistan.”
“Clearly the surge in operations in Afghanistan is an attempt to deliver that decisive blow, but it seems to me unlikely that it can be delivered by military means. It must be delivered by other means—by binding in the tribal structures that exist in that strong society in Afghanistan and recognising that the authority of the Kabul Government simply does not, and never will, extend into the outreaches of that extraordinarily disparate country. Governance has to arise from the strength of the local communities and cannot be premised on some abstract constitution that was written at a conference in Bonn with a substantial part of the Pashtun tribe simply not represented. My other reason for scepticism is that the pivotal, decisive strategic engagement has shifted out of Afghanistan and is taking place in the Swat valley.”
“Although there are other factors, the problem has been the political failure in Afghanistan, to which I tried to draw the Secretary of State’s attention—the failure in Kabul, the failure of the Karzai Government, the Bonn constitution and the western-imposed Afghan national consensus, and the corruption of that Government. The Government’s paper continues: “Governance is beset by corruption and lack of capacity, which is compounded by the lack of security. The combination of insecurity, poverty, lack of good governance and social and economic development, and perception of widespread corruption”— that word again— “deepens the challenge of persuading the people to back their government over the Taleban…the insurgency has not been delivered a decisive blow”.”
“There is hope, but I remain sceptical about whether large formations of foreign military forces will work in a country where the foreigner is regarded with great suspicion, especially if he arrives carrying powerful weaponry and destructive power. I am sceptical about whether the big American surge will solve the problem. There are two more reasons for that, one of which is stated in the Government’s own paper on Afghanistan and Pakistan. Page 9 of that paper, in section 3, “Afghanistan—the current situation”, states: “The solution remains political”.”
“Blunt), who served with the Light Dragoons, that that sentiment would be familiar to any soldier who served in Northern Ireland. Counter-insurgency is about tying one arm behind one’s back to observe legality, proportionality and rigid discipline to a strategy. It is about ensuring that the tiniest things do not get blown up into huge strategic problems. That is extremely difficult, and I believe that the American army has learned counter-insurgency far faster than we ever imagined it would. We have to stop pretending that we in the British Army do it much better than everyone else, because the Americans have caught us up and may even be overtaking us in their capability to deliver it.”
“The conduct of counter-insurgency operations therefore has to be 10 times more careful to avoid civilian casualties than in Anbar. There is cause for optimism, because I believe American policy is shifting and developing. My hon. Friend the shadow Secretary of State quoted General McChrystal, who has been nominated the American commander in Afghanistan and who has said: “If defeating an insurgent formation produces popular resentment, the victory is hollow and unsustainable”. He went on to say: “This is a critical point. It may be the critical point. This is a struggle for the support of the Afghan people. Our willingness to operate in ways that minimise casualties or damage—even when doing so makes our task more difficult—is essential to our credibility.” I put it to my hon. Friend the Member for Reigate (Mr.”
“However, that is to misunderstand the very different nature of tribal society in Helmand compared with that in Anbar. Anbar was firmly anchored in an established nation state with a strong sense of national identity—Iraq. That national identity exists to some degree in Afghanistan, but the tribal loyalties are far stronger, and, in the case of the Pashtun tribe, span its borders, as they reach into the ungoverned tribal areas of Pakistan. Pashtunistan is a country that exists in the minds of everybody who lives there—it is just not drawn on the maps that were left by the British empire. The Pashtuns have very strong tribal traditions. Pashtunwali is the honour code that requires someone to avenge the death of one of their kinsmen, which means that the effect of civilian casualties is perhaps 10 times more corrosive than in Anbar.”
“Having long called for a debate on Afghanistan alone, I shall concentrate on what is going on in Helmand and what flows from it. The question that must preoccupy us is whether more foreign troops in Helmand would break the deadlock. I would hazard three reasons why that might not be the case. I somehow doubt that more kinetic effort, more bombs and bullets, more helicopters, more knocking on doors in the middle of the night to try to find the terrorists, more civilian casualties, and more alienation would not lead to more insurgency. It is tempting to believe that the strategy pursued in Anbar by General Petraeus, which empowered the Anbar tribes to take charge of their own security, in co-operation with the American military forces and the emerging Iraqi forces, might be replicated in some way in Helmand.”
“For example, should the five debates be on debatable motions tabled by the Government in order to find out whether the House had confidence in the aspect of policy under discussion, thereby allowing the Opposition parties to table amendments and divide the House on them? There is another disadvantage to these very broad debates. When we come into the Chamber, we think that we are going to discuss defence in the world, and then hear announcements about equipment, points raised about spending on research and development, and tributes paid to individual servicemen. It is too broad and unfocused, and a debatable motion might improve the focus. I am afraid that I am going to ignore Iran and North Korea, Russia and Georgia, Somalia and piracy, and all the other issues challenging global security.”
“I was not throwing blame; in fact, I was trying to avoid that. We must change the current system, and I have some suggestions to make. We have not had a debate on a motion on Afghanistan since Op Herrick began. If there were a debate on a Government or Opposition motion as to whether we support the current policy in Afghanistan, I am sure that a great many colleagues would attend and take part. I have a suggestion for my right hon. Friend the Member for North-East Hampshire (Mr. Arbuthnot), the Chairman of the Defence Committee. It is our job as a Select Committee to sit down and discuss how defence issues are debated and scrutinised in the House as a whole, and we could make recommendations about whether there should be some changes.”
“Or are we going to become just another passenger on the American aircraft carrier, with little say and little influence over an increasingly unstable world that threatens the safety and prosperity of our citizens and the people we represent? We have been feeling pretty sorry for ourselves throughout the expenses crisis in the past few weeks, but I invite right hon. and hon. Members to reflect on the fact that there are people who are facing far greater challenges and dangers and far more pain than we are. In the end, we are letting those people down by asking them to take on global challenges without having a policy to match those tasks with the necessary money and political will to ensure that they succeed.”
“We need to ask ourselves what sort of country we really want to be. Whichever Government are in power, we will fight our way through this period of stringent financial controls as a result of the recession and getting our debt back under control. We will get through that, one way or another. We need to nurse our defence forces through what will be a difficult period, but what will we be aiming for at the other end? Will we be aiming to be the power that can project military force throughout the world, fight alongside the United States and maintain its influence in the forums of the world because we will maintain our nuclear deterrent and have aircraft carriers, strike aircraft and the breadth of technological capability that means that we can interact and fight on a global basis?”