Fabian Hamilton
MP for Leeds North East · Labour · United Kingdom
“In 2018, I began my campaign to abolish the rule that stipulates that in England and Wales, remarriage revokes any previous will. It is clear that such a rule is no longer fit for purpose and opens the door to abuse—unscrupulous individuals often marry vulnerable people, enabling them to inherit their estate upon death.”
“Q14. I recently met bereaved constituents who lost their babies at Leeds teaching hospitals NHS trust. Understandably, their confidence in the system is at an all-time low. They want answers about the circumstances in which at least 56 babies and two mothers have died in recent years.”
“Some colleagues will raise domestic concerns, but I will focus on the international dimension and its purpose for those who do not enjoy many rights in daily life. The rights framework empowers people, providing standards based on entitlement to state protection by which they can judge and call out Government actions.”
“Today marks the progress of the international human rights framework, now supported by more than 60 treaties protecting vulnerable groups, including women, children and persons with disabilities.”
“According to Front Line Defenders, at least 324 human rights defenders in 32 countries were killed in 2024, with the highest numbers in Colombia, Mexico, Guatemala, Palestine and Brazil. This year, the APPG met human rights defenders from many countries—most recently from Mexico, Cambodia, Peru, Myanmar and Belarus.”
“I am sure we will be interrupted by a Division any minute now, but it is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Butler. I am delighted to follow the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon), and I congratulate the hon.”
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Every one of 610 lines we hold for Fabian Hamilton, in date order, each linked to its source. Free to read, in full, without an account. Page 10 of 13.
“May I ask the Minister how much time during the UK- Africa investment summit last month was dedicated to discussing the elimination of corruption and the protection of human rights, as two of the key preconditions of any new trade deals, especially given the presence of a notorious human rights abuser such as Egypt’s President Sisi?”
“Last week, three rockets struck the US embassy compound in Baghdad, leaving one person injured. In the light of increased tensions following the US action against Qasem Soleimani, will the Minister tell us what measures are being taken to reduce the risk to our troops in the region, and will he update us on progress in relation to our counter-Daesh programme?”
“We in the Opposition will play our part, and I know the Government will play theirs, in protecting the international order and the treaty so that the wonderful continent of Antarctica will be protected for future generations and for our planet Earth.”
“Thankfully, the use of drones on Antarctica has been restricted, and their use by tourists for recreational purposes is banned. Antarctica is well suited for increasing the accuracy of global positioning satellites. Since the treaty was signed in 1959, technology has advanced massively and rapidly, and the fear among many of the signatories is that some of the technologies being used and tested on the continent could be used for military purposes elsewhere. I hope that that is not the case. Perhaps the Minister will answer that question. I am sure that across the House we all believe in a rules-based international order.”
“Article 76 of that treaty provides the legal means by which coastal states can gain sovereignty over vast areas of submarine continental shelf offshore from their coasts, which is something we should be wary of. The Antarctic, as we know, is home to the Antarctic krill, the last untouched marine living resource on the planet, and long may it remain so. It is believed that the continent contains huge amounts of hydrocarbons and minerals such as zinc, iron and uranium, along with a significant number of rare earth elements. Again, we must be vigilant in ensuring that there is never the temptation to exploit the continent of Antarctica for such minerals. Doing so would wreak further destruction not only on Antarctica, but on our whole planet. Finally, I will mention some new technologies.”
“Friend the Member for Bristol West (Thangam Debbonaire) talked about her family currently visiting the area; the Minister has family there at the moment as well. In 2018, 50,000 tourists visited Antarctica, with an expected increase of 10% in 2019. To protect the region from excessive tourism, the signatories to the treaty agreed to prevent vessels carrying more than 500 passengers from landing on the continent and to allow no more than 100 passengers to land at any one time—a very sensible precaution. We have also talked about global warming this afternoon. As we know, global warming opens up new challenges to Antarctica that will necessitate new and more robust laws to protect the continent. More and more countries, however, have been using the United Nations convention on the law of the sea—UNCLOS—to stake a claim to marine territory.”
“Article 7 of the protocol states: “Any activity relating to mineral resources, other than scientific research, shall be prohibited.” The protocol also states that Antarctica is a “natural reserve, devoted to peace and science.” Article 7 absolutely prohibits any form of mining until a further review in 2048—I suspect well beyond my lifetime. The Antarctic Act 1994 implements the treaty into UK law, thus allowing the British Government to grant permission for and monitor British activity in Antarctica: science programmes, expeditions, tourism or, indeed, heritage management, although I am slightly baffled as to what that could mean. In 2017 the British Antarctic Survey announced a £100 million investment programme to upgrade polar infrastructure. We have mentioned tourism this afternoon, and my hon.”
“Among its principal purposes, the treaty has to ensure “in the interest of all mankind that Antarctica shall continue forever to be used exclusively for peaceful purposes and shall not become the scene or object of international discord”. Perhaps that is why I am replying for the Opposition this afternoon in my role as the shadow Minster for peace. The treaty currently has 54 member states. Article IV states: “No new claim, or enlargement of an existing claim, to territorial sovereignty in Antarctica shall be asserted while the present Treaty is in force.” There have been further additions, such as the protocol on environmental protection to the Antarctic treaty, known as the Madrid protocol.”
“As has already been mentioned, the Antarctic is home to 70% of the world’s fresh water. Can we afford to have the ice melt into the sea, which is, of course, not fresh water? That would have a terrible effect on our ability to supply our world—humanity and all its living creatures—with fresh water. The Antarctic treaty has been mentioned quite a lot this afternoon. It was signed in Washington DC on 1 December 1959 and came into force on 23 June 1961. It protects an area that constitutes 10% of the earth’s surface from national interests and dedicates it to peaceful scientific purposes. It is, as we have heard this afternoon, the world’s largest marine conservation area.”
“On 17 March 2012, the centenary of his death, I had the privilege of unveiling a memorial plaque to him in Meanwood Park. I remind hon. and right hon. Members that he was born on 17 March 1880 and died on 17 March 1912—his 32nd birthday—during that tragic expedition. Of course, the expedition lives on in our collective memories and is absolutely vital to our understanding and our discovery of the importance of Antarctica. As has already been mentioned, it was a Russian naval officer named Fabian—Fabian Gottlieb Thaddeus von Bellingshausen, a cartographer and explorer who became an admiral, and who lived from 1778 to 1852—who first spotted the ice shelf on the Princess Martha coast on 27 January 1820. That was 200 years and a day ago, according to my information.”
“He added that we must redouble our efforts on biosecurity, because who knows what is locked up in that ice and may well be released, should it melt? The hon. Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham said that the effect of climate change in Antarctica would be irreversible if we allowed the ice to continue to melt at the current rate. That would lead to an unprecedented rise in sea levels, which, as the hon. Member for North Wiltshire pointed out, could drown us here in the Palace of Westminster, never mind most of London and a lot of the United Kingdom. When the hon. Gentleman mentioned the Terra Nova expedition led by Robert Scott, I reflected that Lawrence Oates, who died many years before I became a Member of Parliament, came from Meanwood in my constituency.”
“Member for North Wiltshire also spoke about the all-party parliamentary group for the polar regions, which would not exist without him. He has done remarkable things to get that group set up and ensure it has the impetus to do things and visit those regions. I congratulate him on that excellent work—long may it continue. The hon. Gentleman thanked the officials in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. I will leave it to the Minister to say more about them—they are her officials—but they do a remarkable job, as does every official of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. He said that Antarctica was the last great wilderness on earth, reminding us that it is larger than the United States and Mexico combined; it is, indeed, a continent of ice.”
“It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Robertson. This is my first Westminster Hall debate of the new Parliament. I hope the hon. Member for North Wiltshire (James Gray) will not mind me calling him my friend. He and I have travelled together to all sorts of far-flung parts of the globe, but sadly not to Antarctica, though we did attend the polar regions conference together in Iceland under the then chairmanship of the then President of Iceland, President Grímsson. The hon. Gentleman made some important points. The world faces its greatest challenge in trying to preserve this extraordinary area of our planet. He said that unless something is done about climate change, we will suffer hugely—a point also made by the hon. Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham (Dr Johnson). The hon.”
“Many Members may have heard of Drancy—it was the place from which the French Jews were deported to the concentration camps. Shortly before my epic ride to Paris from Leeds, I learned that my great-grandmother, Reina Sevilla, was deported from the Vél d’Hiv via Drancy to Birkenau concentration camp, where she was murdered in the gas chambers—a direct personal connection to the holocaust.”
“I rise, of course, to support the motion on Holocaust Memorial Day and to tell the House how proud I am to represent one of the largest Jewish communities in the United Kingdom, who have done so much over so many years—indeed, almost centuries—to enhance our city, benefit its people, and to work above and beyond just their community. There are about 8,500 Jewish people in Leeds, almost all of whom live in north-east Leeds. In 2014, I did one of my charity bike rides—many Members may remember that I do one every year to raise funds for a good cause—to raise money for Donisthorpe Hall, which is a Jewish elderly persons’ nursing home in the constituency, and very wonderful it is, too. It depends very much on voluntary donations, so the purpose of my ride was to do a kind of Jewish pilgrimage, going from Donisthorpe to Drancy in Paris.”
“When I met him at Yad Vashem, he was with his friend Jacob. Jacob and Arek had shared a bunk in every camp they were in from the age of 11 until they were liberated at the age of 16. How they survived is quite a miracle.”
“Lilian has taken the memory of her father and the experience he had, and she has worked with the HSFA and the survivors to create this fantastic centre. If hon. Members have not been there, they should please go—it is absolutely brilliant, as my hon. Friend the Member for Huddersfield said. I also want to pay tribute to the survivors who still live and, indeed, to those who are no longer with us. My constituent Arek Hersh, who lives in the village of Harewood, has a wonderful mix of Polish and Yorkshire when he speaks English—it is a great accent. A room at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem has been named after him. He wrote a wonderful book about his experience, which I recommend. He is 91 now; he was an 11-year-old boy when he was taken off the streets of the Lodz ghetto in Poland. He was then taken to a number of different camps.”
“The idea is that, once their physical presence has left us, their presence will still be felt through a series of interactive holographic videos. Visitors can go to the centre and actually interview some of the people in those videos—many of whom are not with us any more—and ask them about their life. What a great tribute to the people who survived, and survived for so many years. What a wonderful thing for our children and grandchildren to have when the physical presence of those individuals is no longer with us. I have to pay tribute to the wonderful Lilian Black. Her father, Eugene, was a survivor from Auschwitz-Birkenau. He was 16 years old when he was there. He died a few years ago, and I remember him well.”
“At the age of 30, for the first time in my life, I heard a first-hand account of life in a concentration camp. That is something I shall never forget, nor should any of us ever forget it. The Holocaust Survivors’ Friendship Association was set up in Leeds and covers most of the north of England; indeed, my hon. Friend the Member for Huddersfield (Mr Sheerman) drew attention to its work in establishing the Holocaust Exhibition and Learning Centre at the University of Huddersfield. It did that by gaining grants from the national lottery heritage fund, the Pears Foundation and the Association of Jewish Refugees, as well as many personal donations. It set up an exhibition called “Through Our Eyes”, for which it interviewed 20 holocaust survivors over several days, many of whom have since died.”
“We met this magnificent old woman of 93, with her painted fingernails, her Jaeger dress and her coiffured hair. We sat down with her in her apartment, and we discussed the war experience. My father had not seen Bella since 1934, when he was 12. However, he had kept photographs—Bella’s had been destroyed when she had been arrested with her daughter and her granddaughter and taken to Bergen-Belsen. We discussed at great length. Luckily, we had a shared language, French, which was my father’s first language and the language of many of the educated Sephardic Jews of Salonica—indeed, I speak it fluently as well—so we had a very good conversation. We laid out on the coffee table the photographs she thought she would never see again, but which my dad had kept, and which I have had electronically scanned.”
“In 1985, I received a surprise phone call from my father, who sadly passed away in 1988. He was doing some research into his family history, and had discovered something quite extraordinary: his family, who he assumed had been murdered in the holocaust—while he was at school here in England and then volunteering for the British Army—had actually survived their incarceration in Bergen-Belsen. My grandfather was born in Salonica—Thessaloniki in modern Greece. It is important to know that the Nazis invaded Salonica somewhat later than many parts of Europe. That meant that many of the Sephardic community of that great city survived, My grandfather’s brother’s wife, Bella Ouziel, not only survived, but, in 1985, was alive and well at the age of 93. My father asked whether I was free at the weekend, and we flew via Athens to Salonica.”
“I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention. Every day in this place—I have been here 22 and a half years—we learn of colleagues who have a connection to a Jewish past, and my hon. Friend has just told us about his. While I was in Paris, I went to Drancy and met the maire adjoint—the deputy mayor—of that small township. We went to the holocaust memorial centre on the housing estate that had become a concentration camp in 1940. While we were there, there were demonstrations in the small town of Sarcelles on the outskirts of Paris—the very town my great-grandmother, Raina Sevilla, came from. The demonstrations were against the Jewish people there. People were calling on the community to burn the synagogue down. This was in 2014, at the very time I was going to commemorate the death of my great-grandmother in the holocaust.”
“So it is with that tribute to Heinz Skyte that I finish my remarks. I thank Members for all the contributions that are being made today, and I thank them for indulging me in talking about my own family’s history.”
“The doctor gathered his belongings in shock, with his daughter and with Heinz, and they took the train out of Hamburg. This was in 1938. They went to Denmark, they crossed the sea to England, and they came to Leeds. The doctor lived until the 1960s. I do not know what became of the daughter. That is a story that I wanted to share with the House because it is a story that Heinz told us from his first-hand experience. Here was one of the last living witnesses of the horrors of the holocaust, someone who himself made a recording, and—I am very proud to hear this—at his funeral on 5 or 6 January at the Jewish cemetery in Leeds, his son Peter said that until his dying day Heinz was a member of the Labour party. He never lost those values. He was never prepared to give them up, in spite of what he did not like in our party.”
“This is the address.” So he turned up, at six or seven in the morning. He walked through the front door to find the old man sitting on the sofa in his full Wehrmacht uniform from the first world war. If you had been a serving officer in the German army, you were allowed, above a certain rank, to keep your uniform, and there was the old doctor with his pointed helmet with the spike on it, and his Iron Cross First Class. The Gestapo had broken down the door—they did not knock on the doors, they broke the doors down—to arrest this filthy Jew, and they had found a man with an Iron Cross, in an army uniform, with the rank of major. They did not know what to do. As Heinz said at the time, “Zey didn’t have ze mobile phones.” They could not ring headquarters to get instructions, so they left.”
““You need to get out of there,” said his mother. “They are going to ransack the synagogues. They are going to arrest and beat the Jewish people of Hamburg. Go to the park, and stay there all night.” It was four o’clock in the afternoon. So Heinz stayed there all night. He saw the fires. He saw Jews being arrested, being beaten, being brutally attacked. He saw the Torah scrolls being removed from the synagogues and burnt in the streets. He saw the destruction of Jewish businesses. He told us this from his first-hand experience. It is the kind of thing that you never forget hearing. After the night of destruction and horror was over, Heinz managed to get through to his mother, and his mother said, “Go and see our family doctor. He has retired from Munich, and he now lives in Hamburg with his daughter. Go to his flat.”
“He was the founding director of the Leeds Jewish Welfare Board and the Leeds Jewish Housing Association, organisations that have done so much for so many Jewish people who have been so underprivileged and have had so many problems in their own lives in the city of Leeds. He made an incredible contribution. He was also a great supporter of Leeds United football club. But the one thing I remember him for—I will finish with this short anecdote—is that in 1998, a year after I was elected to this place to represent my constituency, he gave a talk on the 60th anniversary of Kristallnacht. We are talking about a number of anniversaries today, Madam Deputy Speaker. Heinz was a student of the University of Hamburg. He was born in Munich, but he went to Hamburg to study. One evening, he received a phone call on his landlady’s telephone.”
“Trude Silman is another survivor. She came from Bratislava during the war, on the Kindertransport. She is 91 now. She is a very close friend of mine and my wife’s: we see her every other week if we possibly can, and I was with her at the weekend. She is a contributor to the exhibition at Huddersfield University, and figures large in it. Eugene Black I have mentioned. John Chillag, who died recently as well, was another holocaust survivor in the city of Leeds. But the person I want to end my contribution by describing is someone who was born on 14 February 1920—two years before my own father was born—and died on 1 January this year, six weeks before his 100th birthday. His name was Heinz Skyte. Heinz was absolutely extraordinary.”
“She had come to Leeds in the early 1960s, and she taught at universities and worked for the local authority. Now, at the age of 96, my constituent Iby writes, lectures and gives talks. Indeed, eight or nine years ago, she did a talk for Members in Speaker’s House, with the blessing of the former Speaker, John Bercow. Some may remember it; it was a very moving occasion. Iby has written another book, “The Woman with Nine Lives”. In her books, she talks about the fact that she never had the tattoo. When people ask her about that, she says, “I do not know why I was not tattooed. Maybe it was because they ran out of ink, or maybe the officer concerned simply had to go to the toilet.” Iby’s first-hand accounts are well worth reading, and it is extraordinary that, at 96, she is still able to go around our schools and educational institutions.”
“Later, she was smuggled across the border to Hungary, where she spent the first part of the war fighting the oppression of the Nazis, until she was eventually arrested as a communist and taken to Auschwitz No. 2 camp. While she was there, she teamed up with all the other women nurses, doctors and dentists—medically qualified people. She did that because, as she says in her book “The woman without a number”—again, I recommend it to all Members here—if people stayed together in solidarity, it was very hard for the Nazis to pick them off individually. She saw Dr Mengele every single day, but because she went to the camps in 1944, she survived. Iby married a British Army colonel after the war. After his death, she began to talk about her experiences.”
“I thank the hon. Gentleman for that powerful intervention. I have always believed that the Poles played the most extraordinary role, and paid a high price for it, in the second world war. My heart goes out to all my Polish friends; I have many, and one of my best friends at school was Polish. He could not go back to Poland until after the end of communism, because his parents had fled the communist regime there. The Poles are a wonderful, brave people. They did so much to resist the Nazis and so much to protect their Jewish population—the largest in the whole of Europe before the second world war. My heart goes out to all Poles who played a vital part in protecting their Jewish citizens as well as their own, who suffered so much. Iby Knill was born in Bratislava.”
“I pay tribute to the hon. Gentleman for his work on fighting antisemitism, defending against it and ensuring that this curse can never happen again. Has he visited the amazing and incredible holocaust museum, Beth Shalom, in Ollerton in Nottinghamshire? It is absolutely incredible. It recreates the classrooms he has just talked about as well as the carriages of the Kindertransport. If he has not done so, I urge him to visit it.”
“With the strategy of engagement from the so-called moderates in Iran now discredited and abandoned, and with the hardliners firmly back in charge in Tehran and an equally unpredictable, trigger-happy President in the White House, we are just one more mistake or miscalculation away from brinkmanship tipping over into war. What action is the Foreign Secretary taking to ensure a permanent de-escalation of the tension, rather than an inexorable drift towards war?”
“These are sure signs not only that the hardliners in Tehran are firmly back in the ascendancy in the Iranian regime, but that their actions are out of control. Nothing and no one can excuse those acts of violence. Like all of us, I fear not just for the Iranian people and the stability of the region, but especially for Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and other dual nationals who are languishing in Iranian jails. I hope that the Foreign Secretary can comment on their current health and safety. Like him, I will be raising those concerns when I meet the Iranian ambassador to London tomorrow. The question we must all ask, and which I ask the Foreign Secretary today, is: where do we go from here? Ever since Donald Trump started to walk away from the Iran nuclear deal, we have been on a path to this point.”
“Thank you for granting this urgent question, Mr Speaker, and may I congratulate the right hon. Member for Bournemouth East (Mr Ellwood) on securing it? The events in Iran and Iraq that have followed the assassination of General Soleimani have been utterly appalling. They include the missile attacks on US bases in Iraq; Iran’s decisions to remove all limits on uranium enrichment; the recent attacks, in the past few days, on protesters on the streets of Tehran; the detention, as has been mentioned, of our excellent ambassador, Rob Macaire; and, of course, the unforgivable shooting down of the Ukrainian airliner, killing 176 innocent civilians, including four Britons, all of whose deaths we mourn today.”
“The proposition is that we help every country in the world, and indeed use our weight at the UN to oblige every country to use the natural resources at their disposal, whether it be wind power, tidal power or solar power, to move rapidly towards a zero-carbon economy, in the process creating millions of new jobs. Britain led the industrial revolution in the 18th and 19th centuries. We are in a very good position to lead this green revolution, and I urge the Government to take that lead.”
“There is something bitterly sad about the fact that those three leaders have all seen raging wildfires in their countries over the past year—in California, in the Amazon and now on the eastern coast of Australia. So the question we all face is how we address the challenge of climate change, how we keep the Paris agreement on track and how we stop our world reaching the point of no return on global warming, where events such as those we are currently seeing in Australia become the new normal. Facing a challenge of that scale, we have to recognise one thing—that what we do alone in the UK will make not a jot of difference to the global problems we all face. What we need instead is what my right hon. Friend the shadow Foreign Secretary called for a year ago: “the globalisation of the green new deal”.”
“But when the fires are finally extinguished, it would be remiss of us if we did not discuss the underlying causes of these unprecedented events; 2019 was the second hottest year on record, and the past five years fill the top five positions as the hottest years on record. Any group of individuals who can look at those figures and continue to deny that global warming and climate change are real issues are equivalent to those people who still insist that the world is flat. Yet, sadly, such individuals include the current President of the United States, Donald Trump; the current President of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro; and— I say this with great regret, given what his country is currently experiencing—the current Prime Minister of Australia, Scott Morrison.”
“Like her, I applaud the astonishing efforts of the Australian firefighters and other emergency services who have been trying to tackle this crisis, and I applaud too all those ordinary Australians who have so movingly and selflessly risked their own lives to save koala bears and other creatures whose populations have suffered such devastation as their natural habitat has been devoured by the flames. I understand that to date up to 1 billion animals may have perished. What we have seen in recent weeks has been nothing short of a catastrophe, for not just Australia but the whole world, and I wholeheartedly share the Minister’s words of sympathy and solidarity with our close friends for what they are going through at the moment.”
“Like all colleagues, let me welcome you to your place, Madam Deputy Speaker, following your unopposed election as Deputy Speaker. I also thank the Minister for advance sight of her statement. I am grateful for her assurance that support is being given to any British nationals and tourists who have been affected, and that support has also been offered to the Australian authorities. However, like her, my thoughts are with our Australian cousins who have lost their homes, jobs, communities and, in some tragic cases, their lives as a result of the fires.”
“Yesterday’s Human Rights Watch report on Saudi Arabia revealed mass arrests of women’s rights activists in the past year and alleged that many of them had been sexually assaulted, whipped and tortured in detention. Does the Minister still think the Prime Minister was right to describe Crown Prince Salman two years ago as “a remarkable young man”?”
“The true answer is that when it comes to Mohammed bin Salman, this Government are all too willing to look the other way. Can the Minister explain how it was possible that in July the Department for International Trade illegally authorised licences for exports of arms to the royal Saudi land forces, a full 41 days after the Foreign Office was told that those forces were operating inside Yemen?”
“We all know about the Government’s disastrous record on recruitment of UK personnel, with the fully trained size of the Army, as we have already heard, having now just fallen to 74,000 personnel. But the Government are failing to recruit enough Commonwealth troops, too, and we now hear that they are cancelling plans to proactively recruit from overseas. Can the Minister explain how this decision guarantees sufficient recruitment to our armed forces, and how on earth he plans to meet the stated target of 82,000 soldiers?”
“Can the Minister of State tell me what clause in UN resolution 2216 provides for Saudi Arabia to bomb captive inmates in a Houthi-run prison in Yemen or for the United Arab Emirates to kill forces loyal to the President that their own coalition is supposed to be there to reinstall? If the answer is that there is none, is it not time for him to bring forward a new UN resolution to replace 2216, demanding an immediate ceasefire by all parties across the whole of the country of Yemen?”
“Those sanctions breach the international agreement that we, the US and other countries worked so hard to achieve and have given the hard-liners in Tehran the excuse they have always craved to return to the strategy of isolation and aggression and to breach the terms of the nuclear agreement. That agreement is one of the great diplomatic achievements of the current century, and we must all strive to get it back on track before this escalation of tension reaches the point of no return.”
“While I would like the Foreign Secretary to go into more practical detail about how the Government plan to resolve the Grace 1-Stena Impero impasse, we must also address the wider question: how do we de-escalate the tension with Iran, stop this tit-for-tat cycle of actions, and get the nuclear deal back on track? We need to use the deal as the foundation, which it previously promised to be, for addressing all the other concerns we have about Iran, not least the continued detention of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and other British dual nationals. Setting aside the need to enforce sanctions, with which we wholeheartedly agree, against the Assad regime, will the Foreign Secretary tell us what the Government are doing to persuade the Trump Administration to drop their sanctions against Iran?”
“If it is correct that we knew a full two days in advance that the action was going to be taken, why on earth, a full seventeen days later, was a British-flagged tanker left so hopelessly unprotected in the strait of Hormuz? Anyone with any understanding of the issue could see exactly how the Iranians would respond to the seizure of their own tanker. When the measures the Foreign Secretary has announced today, which are welcome, could have been put in place a full 20 days before now, why were the Government’s eyes so patently off the crystal ball?”
“This brings us to the specific issue of the seizure of the Grace 1 oil tanker and the unacceptable retaliatory action that Iran has taken against Stena Impero. We know from the Spanish newspaper El Pa í s that the US told the Madrid Government 48 hours in advance that Grace 1 was headed for the Iberian peninsula, which could also explain why, 36 hours in advance, the Gibraltar Government introduced new legislation to shore up the legal basis for the seizure taking place in their waters. Will the Foreign Secretary confirm whether the US was also the source of our information regarding the tanker’s course, whether the US Administration asked us to seize it, and whether their primary basis for that request was that the tanker’s destination was Syria or that its origin was Iran?”
“We all know why these events have been taking place. Just like in the tanker war in the 1980s, a simple and ruthless logic is being applied by the Iranian hard-liners who are now in the ascendancy in Tehran, just as they were 30 years ago. That logic simply says, “If you try and stop our oil supplies, we will stop yours.” This escalation of tit-for-tat rhetoric and action has been sadly predictable and to some extent inevitable since the United States walked away from the Iran nuclear deal and reimposed sanctions not limited to the US but in theory applying to any company or country that continues to deal with Iran. I say “in theory” because, as we all know, countries such as China that are powerful enough to ignore the Trump Administration’s demands have continued to import oil and gas from Iran while Washington turns a blind eye.”
“We thank him for the spirit in which he engaged in our parliamentary debates and we look forward to his continuing to make those contributions from the Back Benches. I would also like to add that, in the unfortunate event that this is the Foreign Secretary’s final appearance in his current role, we thank him too for the welcome change in tone and the very welcome change in work ethic that he has brought to that great office of state, not least on the issue of Iran, which we are discussing today. Iran’s actions in recent weeks in the strait of Hormuz have been utterly unacceptable and should be condemned from all sides. Our thoughts, first and foremost, are with the 23 crew members on board the Stena Impero, and of course their families, who are facing this period of concern and uncertainty.”