Sir Julian Lewis
MP for New Forest East · Conservative · United Kingdom
“I will share with the House one particular case that is representative of many. My constituent, Mrs Gillian Pothecary, lost her husband almost a year ago. She wrote to me in July about her valiant but so far unavailing quest to obtain a civil service widow’s pension.”
“She said: “Mrs Pothecary’s…case falls under the commitment to be fully resolved by early September at the absolute latest. Capita has assured me that her case is on their escalation log and has been flagged for priority handling.” I rang up Gill just before coming into this debate and—you’ve guessed it, Dame Siobhain—she has not yet recei…”
“As the Minister seems to have run out of supportive Back Benchers, I shall endeavour to ask him a helpful and easy question. Accepting that it will be some years, to put it mildly, before we can eliminate our dependency on oil and gas, does he accept in principle that we are more secure if we exploit our own domestic oil and gas resources…”
“I warmly endorse almost everything the Secretary of State has said today, and I genuinely congratulate him on his appointment. In my first speech in this House almost 30 years ago, I promised to support Labour Governments as long as they supported the nuclear deterrent, the conventional armed forces and NATO.”
“On Monday, just as campaigners from the New Forest and Waterside were handing into Downing Street a 32,000-signature petition against the appalling and unfair outcome of local government reorganisation affecting our area, the welcome announcement was made by the Government that the local government reform proposals for Hampshire and three…”
“We are now in a situation that is worse than that at the height of the cold war, so the comparison we have to make is between what we are spending now and what we spent during the cold war, which was, in modern calculating methods, between 4.5% and 5.1% on defence. So let us not talk about increases to 2.7%.”
The complete record
Every one of 3,750 lines we hold for Sir Julian Lewis, in date order, each linked to its source. Free to read, in full, without an account. Page 21 of 75.
“On a different but not unrelated point, the Minister will recall that I referred to the annual report given to the Secretary of State detailing the individual bulk personal datasets that had been retained and examined. There is no extra work involved in letting the ISC and IPCO see that report. The only possible justifiable exclusion would be something that, at the time of the report, was still current. Is there any reason at all why IPCO and the ISC should not be sent that report, rather than a severely watered-down version?”
“In that case, we can reach agreement if the Minister would like to give us an assurance that the only difference between the two reports will be the exclusion of matters that are current at the time of drawing up the report, but I suspect that there will be many other differences between the two reports.”
“Do the Government accept that it is difficult to deter terrorist fanatics, and that one mainly has to contain the effectiveness of what they do until they are ultimately destroyed, preferably by our regional allies? Does the Secretary of State feel that there is in fact a link to a separate conflict, and that is the conflict in Ukraine? Is it not more than a coincidence that the proxies of Russia’s ally in the middle east have been so much more active while Russia is so desperate for us to turn our attention away from supporting Ukraine?”
“I am grateful to my hon. Friend, both for initiating this debate and for kindly letting me say a word about the Freshwater Habitats Trust, whose New Forest representative, Thea Margetts, I met at the volunteer fair put on by the national park authority last weekend. It is amazing what these volunteers contribute, not least the New Forest water code and other great pointers and advice as to how we can keep these precious but delicate environments safe.”
“I share the concern of the hon. Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Richard Foord) about the attitude towards the Ukraine fight, and indeed towards NATO, of certain elements on the American political scene. Will our Foreign Office team do everything in their power to impress on our American allies that the peace of Europe depends on unquestionable American support for the NATO alliance in the future, just as it did in the past?”
“What assessment have the Government made of the threat to the future of the Baltic states if Putin is seen to succeed in seizing territory permanently from Ukraine?”
“When the wonderful Taylor Swift discovered that her back catalogue had been bought by a purchaser of whom she disapproved, she began to render it worthless by re-recording all her previous hits. Is that an example that journalists at The Spectator and The Telegraph might do well to follow?”
“Will the Minister be investigating the discovery, exposed by The Sunday Times yesterday, of Russell Group universities taking students with much lower academic qualifications for undergraduate degrees, and when he does so, will he check that the same is not happening in the postgraduate field, given the much higher fees that can be charged for overseas students?”
“One way in which one can stretch the terms of the debate a little further than its precise wording without infringing any rules is to remark upon the fact that in the Red sea, British naval assets are particularly important. Does the shadow Secretary of State agree that there should be no question, now or in the near or medium future, of our losing our amphibious assault ships, which are so necessary for the combined operations that one must engage in when taking on piratical opponents?”
“I am grateful, and I regard him as my hon. Friend too. Before he leaves the issue of percentages spent on defence, would he not agree with me that, crude though they are, these are indicators of a national priority? The trouble is that if we do not spend enough on defence in peacetime, and then a conflict breaks out—we are now beginning to hear talk of having to be prepared for major conflict in the next decade or two—we will be spending vastly more than 3% or 4% on defence. So how much better is it to spend a bit more in peacetime to prevent the conflict, and how much better than that is it that America should realise that investing in Ukraine’s effort is also helping to raise the deterrence threshold?”
“I am afraid I do. I agree with my hon. Friend’s main thrust, that there is no doubt that the Prime Minister and the Executive have the right to take initial action and seek support afterwards. Having said that, the case of Syria in particular has become a byword for a wrong and terrible decision, because the ghastly Assad remained in power, but the alternative would have been another Islamist swamp such as we saw in Libya. It was because there was a strong feeling in the House that Syria would have been another Iraq or another Libya that there was such pressure to have a vote. For my part, I think the result was absolutely right.”
“My right hon. Friend is, as always, the model of courtesy. For the avoidance of any lingering doubt—I am sure this can be avoided as I am getting very positive signals from the Defence Secretary sitting to his left—will he confirm that HMS Albion and HMS Bulwark, whose planned out-of-service dates are 2033 and 2034 respectively, not only will not be scrapped ahead of time, but will not be mothballed either?”
“Like many other Members here, I was not aware of this issue until several constituents contacted me. Does the hon. Lady know whether there is any mechanism whereby small farmers and other suppliers can report it to the regulator when they are put in this difficult situation as a result of promises to make purchases not being kept? I do not see how the regulator can regulate if they do not have adequate information about where suppliers are being let down.”
“How many times must a demonstration in the same cause be repeated, week in and week out, before the well-funded organisers become liable to pay for at least part of the policing costs?”
“The Prime Minister was clearly absolutely justified to respond as he did, particularly after the direct attack against HMS Diamond, but given that at the time of the Falklands campaign we had 35 frigates and destroyers and were spending 4.5% of GDP on defence, whereas both those figures can be cut in half to describe our situation today, does he agree that we certainly should not be reducing the numbers of frigates or destroyers, and that we certainly should not be mothballing, or otherwise decommissioning, our amphibious assault ships?”
“Member for Wallasey (Dame Angela Eagle), we find that we have a minimum of typesetting alterations to undertake given that they share the same surname. We are grateful to the right hon. Member for Garston and Halewood and we are grateful to her replacement for stepping into the void. Our loss is the Labour party’s Defence Front Bench team’s gain. Question put and agreed to.”
“I just wish to put on the record the Committee’s appreciation of the hard work of the right hon. Member for Garston and Halewood (Maria Eagle) on the Intelligence and Security Committee. She served for a period of almost two years. She made major contributions to our annual reports published in December 2022 and December 2023 and in our major subject reports on China, published in July 2023, and on international partnerships in December 2023. Her contribution will also have an effect on our future reports on Iran and cloud technology due to be published before the end of the Parliament. Her legal training also made a valuable contribution to our examination of key legislation of relevance to the Committee, on which we were advised to tender advice. Finally, even in the right hon. Lady’s departure, by her being replaced by the hon.”
“In that case, we would again make it clear that we would not get sucked in, but would continually keep the threat of counter-action available while avoiding seeking to transform the society in a way that was wholly impractical.”
“Member for North East Fife (Wendy Chamberlain) made about Afghan women, is that we may have pursued an unrealistic and utopian policy towards Afghanistan, but, in doing that, we created obligations to those Afghans who sought to travel along the route with us. We must not abandon them. When I hear about the idea of our having a strategy towards the country, I think of our options as extremely limited. The strategy that we ought to have had is one of containment, whereby we would make it perfectly clear that we had intervened militarily once and would not get sucked in, but that, if there were to be any sign of further terrorist activity aimed at us or our allies, we would not hesitate to intervene militarily again.”
“I have therefore felt, and argued for over a decade, that what we needed with a country such as Afghanistan was not an approach whereby we would be able rapidly to bring it into the modern world, but that we should be able to contain the threats that it posed to us—for a very long period, if necessary—until, by its own evolution, it came to develop the sorts of values that would result in those threats ceasing to exist. That option has now been taken away from us by President Biden’s catastrophic decision to abandon everything and effectively betray all the people in Afghanistan who had put their trust in the NATO countries that had tried, over-ambitiously, to develop Afghan society. What I feel very strongly, which came out so well in the remarks that the hon.”
“The fact is that, if we were to go back 400 or 500 years into the history of our own country, we would find religious fanaticism that is not all that dissimilar to what pertains in countries that are subject to what has today been termed radical political Islam. If we then frame the proposition that some completely different society, seeking to impose their more modern values on the England of 500 years ago, could have managed to inculcate those values into a society with a belief that God Almighty was telling them to do one thing and to disregard all alternatives as infidel structures that must be destroyed, we can see that it is pretty unrealistic to think that societies could be transformed with that degree of rapidity.”
“As too many past speeches will attest, I came to the conclusion over a decade ago that the whole concept of the west trying to engage in nation building from the ground up in countries such as Afghanistan was largely futile, because—and I quote my right hon. Friend, who referred to this country’s democratic journey across the centuries—it often takes centuries for democracy to evolve in a society. We have no reason per se to feel superiority over countries that we regard as undemocratic today, because we had so much longer than they have had so far to evolve the institutions, values and tolerances in which we have reason to be proud.”
“That was true for the Bolsheviks, for example: Britain intervened in the Russian civil war in an attempt to prevent the Bolsheviks from establishing communist control in what became the USSR, but we failed, and, after a few years, that regime had eventually to be recognised. Where I find it hard to go further with my right hon Friend is in the belief that we can somehow manipulate the system to make significant improvements or avert significant threats from an Afghanistan run by the militant Taliban, even if he detects—rightly, I am sure—significant factions within the Taliban spectrum, such as it is.”
“I shall put forward a few random and hopefully connected thoughts that have occurred to me in the course of the contributions we have heard so far. I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth East (Mr Ellwood) on securing the debate, and I commiserate with him on the fact that he paid a high political price in losing the chairmanship of the Defence Committee, which I know he valued greatly, as a result of speaking out on this subject. I can go part of the way with my right hon. Friend in support of his thesis about engagement, by saying this: no matter how much we detest a particular regime, a time always comes when, if in reality it has established full control over a country, it gets international recognition.”
“Let us by all means face reality, but let us reassert that we know that this combination of politics, regime and religious extremist ideology is a total threat to us. We will do everything in our power to protect ourselves. Any aid and support that we give to the Afghan Government, as we will eventually have to call it, must be contingent on something in return at every stage. That will probably be in relation to the saving of groups, whether they be women’s groups or former military personnel to whom we owe obligations. That is the saving of people whose lives were changed by our intervention, and who have a right to look to us to help to protect them against the ghastliness of the regime that has sadly re-emerged and taken control of their country.”
“What I think we can do can be summed up in the following way. We will, indeed, have to recognise that the Taliban are in control. Therefore, just as we have a sort of relationship, however adversarial, with obnoxious and hostile regimes in other countries, so we will have to do that with the Taliban. We must not fool ourselves that having a relationship with them will result in any real reduction in the threat that they and their of way life poses, particularly when they have adherents within our own societies. We saw for many years how much damage people who owed a form of allegiance to the Soviet Union could cause, through their fifth columnists in democratic societies. There is an equivalent danger from radical political Islam, too.”
“The reasons for that are probably more related to Pakistan’s relations with countries such as India, and have too little regard to the other effects that bringing in a regime such as the Taliban’s might have on the stability and security of the international system and the rules-based international order—about which we hear so much although we often wonder whether it exists. I share the continuing concern of the hon. Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Richard Foord). I am far from satisfied that we are in a secure situation. On the contrary, I feel that the withdrawal and abandonment of Afghanistan have given a huge boost to those who say that the western system of society is degenerate and enfeebled, and will surely fail in the face of a radical Islamic alternative. What do we do about this now?”
“I absolutely am concerned about the attitude of Pakistan and about the potential for Pakistani nuclear weapons to one day pass under the control of more radical elements than are currently running that country. What should particularly worry us—this is what I think David Cameron had in mind when, as Prime Minister, he talked about Pakistan facing both ways on the question of radical Islam—is the fact that there has been a wish in Pakistan Government circles to see the triumph of the Taliban.”
“Surely special consideration must be given to those members of the Afghan special forces who, even if they did not work directly for us, worked extremely closely with us. Can the Minister tell the House how many, or how few, members specifically of the Triples and the special forces face a constant threat to their lives and ought to be rescued?”
“A “short-sighted, militarily illiterate manoeuvre totally at odds with strategic reality” was how the Defence Committee described, in February 2018, the proposal to retire HMS Albion and HMS Bulwark ahead of their anticipated lifetime dates of 2033 and 2034. May I advise and warn the Secretary of State not to be blindsided by the people who are raising this matter again after a change of Secretary of State for Defence?”
“Given that Hamas will never accept a two-state solution, does the Minister agree that any two-state solution must exclude Hamas—or any renamed successor—from any role in the government of Gaza after this horror is all over?”
“If individual employees of the Post Office face serious criminal charges for malicious prosecution or criminal conspiracy, how would the Minister feel if it turned out that the Post Office proposed to pay for their legal defence costs, given how it treated its own sub-postmasters?”
“I agree with my hon. Friend that we have sent a great deal of ammunition to Ukraine. The question is, have we been able to replace that ammunition, especially in the context of a war that seems to be attritional and likely to go on for a considerable amount of time?”
“How many times must a totalitarian communist state behave like a totalitarian communist state before the Government will recognise it as a totalitarian communist state?”
“In welcoming this project for a long-term future aircraft, may I ask the Secretary of State whether he agrees that the threat picture that will face it will in large measure depend on the outcome of the conflict between Ukraine and Russia? Can he say anything to the House about the efforts that he and fellow NATO members are making to ensure that Ukraine has some current aircraft with which to defend itself, so as to improve the prospects that will face us when this future aircraft comes into being?”
“We have demanded the right to look at the classified elements of that unit’s work. Finally, if the right hon. Gentleman were allowed into a secure room to look at the documentation that will come before the Investment Security Unit, if it is ever allowed to look at this deal, does he believe that his looking at that documentation without cleared staff, without being able to take notes and without being able to go away and discuss it with anybody else—as we on the Intelligence and Security Committee can do under our special regime—would amount to effective scrutiny of something with such clear security implications?”
“I am very grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for bringing this debate before the House. I am here primarily to listen, rather than contribute, but it is overwhelmingly clear that the relatively new Investment Security Unit is tailor-made to consider a merger proposal such as this one. However, does the right hon. Gentleman realise that, if he gets his wish and the Investment Security Unit does consider the merger proposal, the Intelligence and Security Committee would be blocked from scrutinising the work of that unit? The Government originally said that all its work should have been overseen and scrutinised by what was the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee. The unit is now in the Cabinet Office, but even now, we are still not being allowed to scrutinise it. There is something very strange, if not sinister, going on.”
“On that point, I recall that in 2021, while the National Security and Investment Bill was going through the House, the Government repeatedly said from the Dispatch Box that in any conflict between economic interest and national security their policy was that national security would come first. That was the whole point of bringing in the legislation. Now it appears that there is even a question mark on whether the structures set up in the legislation will examine this proposed questionable deal, let alone allow it to be effectively scrutinised by Parliament once they have done that examination.”
“I am not asking my right hon. Friend to say whether this particular proposed merger is being investigated. What I am asking him to say is whether the Government accept that there is a significant national security dimension to any proposal for a merger involving a major shareholding by a Chinese subservient company.”
“Even if the Foreign Secretary were at the Dispatch Box today, I doubt if he would do a better job than my right hon. Friend. Can he say whether the Government have made any estimate of the number of Hamas fighters who have been killed? We seem to get very precise estimates of the number of civilians who have been killed but, clearly, a large number of Hamas fighters are engaged in opposing Israeli forces on the ground. Are any other people, other than Hamas fighters, resisting Israeli forces on the ground?”
“I think I am right in saying that the International Security Assistance Force was officially a NATO assistance force to the then Afghan Government, so what is there to prevent NATO countries from banding together and making joint representations to the Pakistani Government that whatever they do with former service personnel who, at our request, fought against the Taliban, they should not now mercilessly deport them to the tender non-mercies of the Taliban, who are currently out for vengeance?”
“I particularly look forward to that part of the Secretary of State’s speech when he will tell us whether this will apply to new leaseholds or will be retrospective on those suffering under existing leasehold arrangements. However, there is one step the Government took that has not been helpful to leaseholders, and of which I have personal experience: creating a presumption in favour of developments where the airspace above a block of flats is sold and the freeholder then insists on having one or two more floors built on top. That can cause immense damage to the building, not to mention disruption, and then who gets the bill for paying for the damage? It is transferred from the freeholder to the leaseholders. The Government should think again about that presumption in allowing that sort of ill-considered development.”
“Does the hon. Lady agree that one of the most telling points made during the debate was the hon. Member for Coventry South (Zarah Sultana) saying at the conclusion of her speech that the most effective response to Islamophobia and antisemitism is when both communities stand by each other in resisting both those threats?”
“Could we add one more to the list of reasons why people conceal their identities in this way, which is to avoid sanctions, including sanctions placed by our own Government?”
“For the sake of people who might not be experts in this field, can the right hon. Lady explain the extent to which those Crown dependencies and overseas territories themselves know where the real ownership of the resources resides? Can we be sure that they themselves know what information is being concealed and ought to be made public, or that we will have got to the bottom of the matter if it is made public?”
“Surely, the problem is that if the Minister were correct and any legitimate media could make an inquiry, any citizen with a real interest could go to the media and get the information that way. That must be known in opting for the filter, so presumably its purpose is only to be obstructive and to create legal barriers.”
“Those on both Front Benches seem to agree that Hamas must not remain in control in Gaza. Is any thought being given to how, once they have been removed, they can be prevented from coming back? There will need to be policing, and a moderate major Arab neighbour of Israel has said that a two-state solution can happen only if it is enforced. Will we have a hand in that enforcement? If not, how can it possibly happen?”
“I thank the Secretary of State for his robust answer to my hon. Friend the Member for Brigg and Goole (Andrew Percy). Does he agree that the sight this weekend of bereaved family members from both the Muslim and Jewish communities joining together in a combined rally against Islamophobia and antisemitism was an inspiring sight that we should all hold in our hearts and honour? Does that not serve as a lesson to those people from one community or the other who preached hatred against others who are in fact innocent victims?”
“If the Government accept that there can be no political solution unless Hamas are removed from control in Gaza, can the Minister explain to us who exactly will remove Hamas from that level of control in Gaza?”
“Does the Home Secretary accept that, in order for any large-scale immigration policy to succeed, it is necessary for people to wish to integrate? What steps are the Government taking to ensure that there is a smooth path to integration for those large numbers of people who come here?”