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%.”
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“Thanks to that support, some 170 academics from all around the world are safe with their families on Cara fellowship placements in the UK. At any given time the Cara team are working to help place dozens more, while other new applications are being carefully sifted and assessed. Many of them will soon lead to successful placements. For each one who comes, however, another will apply and will deserve help. We talk often about attracting the best and the brightest to this country. With the generous support of the UK’s universities and research institutes, Cara plays a crucial part in this endeavour—but with the important difference that were it not for Cara, these highly talented people would in many cases be destitute, locked up, badly injured or even dead. The work is painstaking and unrelenting, and it is carried out by just 14 people.”
“I am grateful to him and his organisation for all they did for my constituent’s sister-in-law. Since then, I have drawn attention to Cara’s work several times and was pleased to table early-day motion 1188 in May, with the backing of 20 more MPs on both sides of the House, to mark the anniversary of its 1933 founding statement. That success for my constituent was just one of hundreds of cases with which Cara is dealing. The charity has steadily built up its support network of UK universities and research institutes, now numbering 135. Most of them host a Cara fellow, often several, and act as their visa sponsors. The House should note that Cara fellows come on regular visas, not as asylum seekers, and, to their great credit, the supporting universities usually cover much or all of the cost of each placement.”
“I entirely agree with everything the right hon. Member says, and I told a special adviser before the debate that I would be mentioning this case. I understand that there has been a statement of concern from four countries—the US, the UK, France and Germany—about this case, and I hope that those in power in Azerbaijan will take the representations seriously. My first contact with Cara came during the fall of Kabul in 2021, when a constituent sought my help to bring her sister-in-law, an academic opposed to the Taliban, to safety in the UK and to a Cara fellowship at the University of Southampton. The task was neither quick nor easy, but it ended successfully with Cara’s help. It is a pleasure to see the executive director of Cara, Stephen Wordsworth, present at the debate today.”
“Finally, the Researchers at Risk programme has shown how effective a Government-funded scheme can be when it works with and complements existing efforts by proven practitioners. The original funding for Researchers at Risk is now fully committed, but I hope that the Government will learn from the undoubted success and be prepared to consider a longer-term follow-on scheme, open to academics at risk around the world. That would, indeed, ensure that the United Kingdom remains a global leader in this admirable field, and worthy of the efforts—”
“Thanks to the care that Cara and the host university visa sponsors take, Cara fellows have in recent years enjoyed a 100% visa application success rate. I hope that the Home Office and UK Visas and Immigration will keep looking positively on Cara-associated visa applications, and that the Department will continue to recognise the contribution that Cara fellows make during their stays in the UK and subsequently through active partnerships, if and when they can safely return home. I also hope that the Home Office and UKVI will, therefore, be ready to discuss with Cara ways in which the visa regime might be adapted to make their fellows’ time in this country even more productive.”
“Cara has also worked with the funding scheme in Germany for at-risk scholars, the Philipp Schwartz Initiative, since its launch in 2016. Cara’s strong track record of supporting threatened scholars around the world is an important contribution to the fulfilment of the UK’s aim to promote a more effective international response to humanitarian crises. As an organisation, it remains unique in Europe, and we should celebrate its 90th anniversary and the difference it has made and continues to make to so many lives for “the relief of suffering and the defence of learning and science”. It requires little direct help from Government. but I have a couple of requests for the Minister. First, as already noted, Cara fellows come to the UK on regular visas.”
“Wiesam completed a visiting fellowship in the department of geography at the University of Manchester, and returned home to Gaza, where he is now working as a professor in thermal remote sensing at Al-Aqsa University. Ahmed completed a visiting fellowship at University College London before returning to Iraq, where he is now a dean of college at a university. In the past two years, Cara has also worked with the British Academy—the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) referred to this—and other national academies, to deliver the largely Government-funded Researchers at Risk programme. Thanks to that, another 180 academics from Ukraine have received awards paid to them by Cara to allow them to continue their work here.”
“Hayat is a researcher from Afghanistan with a PhD and a master’s degree from the UK and the US respectively, but this previous international experience attracted reprisals from the Taliban. As a Cara fellow at the University of Nottingham, he is carrying out work in three research projects on the impact of conflict and natural disasters on households’ welfare and food security. Huda was a radiology researcher in Syria when she contacted Cara. She experienced bombings throughout the conflict and was once shot at in her car. Cara helped her to secure a postdoctoral placement at the University of Cambridge, after which she was awarded a global talent visa. Ayşe completed a visiting fellowship at Wolfson College, University of Oxford, and returned home to Turkey, where she continues to do research on gender violence.”
“I could not agree more with the hon. Gentleman, who is another long-time friend from across the divide in the House of Commons Chamber. He is absolutely right, and I will refer in a little more detail to the Researchers at Risk programme very shortly. I return to my list of examples of people who have been saved and are now doing well. Nooria, from Afghanistan, is a specialist in gynaecology and obstetrics, and was working as both a clinician and an associate professor at the Kabul University of Medical Sciences. After the Taliban takeover, she was trapped at home. With Cara’s support, she was offered a visiting research position at the University of Cambridge, where her work has now led to a fully funded PhD offer.”
“My hon. Friend tempts me to move into a wider area of controversy, but one thing that I would note, without crossing that line, is that very often the people in our university community in the United Kingdom who speak out most strongly in favour of freedom of speech and who insist that people should listen to views with which they might not necessarily agree, rather than shout them down, have often experienced repression in their own countries and come to the United Kingdom to escape that type of restriction. I will leave that point there and resume what will be my final sentence by repeating the fact that building on the undoubted success of the Researchers at Risk scheme would ensure that we remain both a global leader in this admirable field and worthy of the efforts made by the eminent founders of Cara 90 years ago.”
“I commend to the Defence team and, indeed, the House the new book by Larisa Brown, “The Gardener of Lashkar Gah”, which outlines in great detail the sort of debt we owe to the people who tried to help our forces. My specific question is not about people serving with the Afghan forces; it is about whether we have a proper database of all those who served with the British forces and are eligible under the scheme, and whether the Minister can guarantee that the scheme will not be closed while some of those people—probably a large number of them—are still in hiding in Afghanistan and thus unable to apply for it.”
“Without referring to any specific case, may I gently remind the Government that their initial response to the ISC’s substantial and wide-ranging report on the national security threat from China, published just two months ago, was to suggest that our findings might be out of date? Will the Deputy Prime Minister therefore confirm that the full Government response, when it comes—we gather it is coming very soon—will set out specific steps to address the threat of Chinese interference, particularly within our democratic system?”
“I welcome the robustness of the Prime Minister’s stance on Russia, but does he agree that there are aspects of other topics discussed at the G20, such as China, which he might not be able to discuss in full on the Floor of the House, but which he could discuss securely with the Intelligence and Security Committee? I should add, however, that whereas for the first 20 years of the Committee’s existence it had a meeting with the Prime Minister every single year, there has been no such meeting since December 2014, although, during her short term in office, this Prime Minister’s immediate predecessor did volunteer to reinstate such meetings. May I ask him whether he will do the same—reinstate the meetings and return to proper, comprehensive scrutiny?”
“Thank you for calling a state-educated Conservative Member, Madam Deputy Speaker. May I, through the Secretary of State, thank Baroness Barran, who reached out immediately to me, together with a highly competent senior official, when this problem arose in one of my local schools this March? Not only did they do that, but they seized the opportunity to encourage a resending of the questionnaire to the network of schools, through the contact that I had with one of my local headteachers. I have rarely, in 26 years in this House, seen a Department so proactive on an issue as this Department has been on this one, and I thank it for that.”
“Does the review report throw any light on the strange paradox that this ban was so rigidly enforced in peacetime, yet during the first and second world wars there was mass conscription, as a result of which many gay military personnel served with distinction and were awarded the highest medals for gallantry?”
“May I express my admiration for my right hon. Friend’s dedicated and distinguished service as Defence Secretary? It is a sad commentary on the state of the special relationship that our American ally did not recognise his suitability to be the next Secretary-General of NATO. My right hon. Friend will remember that successive Defence Committees, well before the invasion of Ukraine, argued that defence expenditure should never have been allowed to fall below 3% of GDP. The present Chancellor of the Exchequer, when he was standing for the leadership in 2019, even expressed the wish that it should be at 4% of GDP, which would have taken us back to the cold war percentage of between 4% and 5.1% of GDP spent on defence. In what way does this refresh allow defence the potential to expand quickly if that extra money is belatedly made available?”
“In May, I referred to the remarkable programme “Women at War: Afghanistan” by the courageous journalist Alex Crawford. I recommend that any Member of this House who has doubts about the enslavement of women in Afghanistan take a look at it. Referring to the resettlement within Britain, can the Minister give us a rough idea how many of the people concerned are translators and thus have an adequate command of English? I suspect the vast majority do not and, as a third-generation member of an immigrant family myself, I know that the key to successful integration is mastering the English language. Is there anything the Minister can do to point those people in the direction of services that might be available to help them to do that?”
“The Secretary of State will be aware that it was back in April 2017 that the then Defence Committee first recommended drawing a line with a statute of limitations coupled with a truth recovery process. We recognised that the process had to be for everyone or for no one. Does he accept that there is a risk of having overcomplicated the process, and is any remedy likely to be available if, in putting this into practice, it is found that service personnel are not being sufficiently protected for ongoing prosecutions?”
“Would it not benefit university courses’ quality more if university administrators were paid a lot less and university lecturers were paid rather more?”
“She refused to engage with the court because she did not recognise its legitimacy. She knew what that would cost her: she spent two years of a three-year sentence in a Polish jail, until Amnesty International made her prisoner of the year, which helped get her released and brought to this country. The fact is that if you are not prepared to accept the verdict of the umpire, don’t play cricket. I am getting increasingly fed up with the brutalisation of language in discussions of this sort, but I have limited sympathy for those people who get into trouble because of tweets and emails. If they open themselves up to that sort of thing, that is precisely what they should expect.”
“Nevertheless, there is one other key point, with which I will conclude, that lies at the heart of the matter. When Members engage with a process that is going to judge them in some way, or at least make recommendations as to how they should be judged, which the House of Commons will then decide whether or not to agree with, and when Members accept that process, then they really ought to accept the result; otherwise, they should not have engaged with the process in the first place. I close with an example of that, which I have asked my parliamentary researcher’s permission to mention. My parliamentary researcher is a lady called Nina Karsov. As an infant, she survived the holocaust. In 1967 she was put on trial in Poland for keeping an anti-communist political diary.”
“The one argument that I have heard against the way in which the Committee has conducted itself that carries any weight with me is this: I think it was unwise to name specific Members in an appendix, when all that the appendix did was give samples, as we have heard, of the sort of extreme criticism bordering on, and perhaps constituting, abuse to which the Committee was being subjected. The Committee would have been wiser to anonymise those quotes. It could have made the point just as effectively without then giving reason to people to feel—with some justification, I think—that they should at least have been informed that they were going to be named. I know the Committee will say, “Well, they’ve had their chance today to set their comments in context,” and some of them have done so.”
“It was a case of not knowing when to stop. I came to the debate this afternoon fully expecting that the Opposition might move an amendment arguing for sanctions against the seven people who were named in an appendix to the report. Had that been put to a Division, I would have voted against it; and had it nevertheless been agreed and had there been a Division on the amended motion, I would have voted against that as well. In my opinion, the Speaker was very wise not to select any of the amendments, on either side of the argument.”
“I remember having an argument with the then Leader of the House, my right hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg), from whom we heard at length this afternoon, in the run-up to the debate about Owen Paterson. At that time, the Privileges Committee had produced a report with a very strong sanction. I had been shocked that that process had continued after Owen Paterson’s wife had committed suicide. My argument was to suggest to the then Leader of the House and the people in my party that it would be sensible to note the Privileges report, but to decide on compassionate grounds to take no further action. That lost out to an alternative policy and we all know where that led. It did not lead anywhere any good for Owen Paterson himself, the Government of the day or the reputation of this House.”
“Friend the Member for Newbury (Laura Farris) for her excellent focus on the heart of the matter, which is to ask the question: is anyone seriously suggesting that the seven members of the Committee, who went through this exhaustive process, were blinded by hatred and bias? I have been in the House since 1997, and I hope, with luck, to carry on a little bit longer. My hon. Friend the Member for Broxbourne (Sir Charles Walker) is in his last Parliament, and I have known him very well since he came in in 2005. I challenge anybody who knows my hon. Friend at all well to believe for one moment that he would allow himself to be blinded by prejudice and bias in an inquiry of this sort. It is inconceivable. There is a tendency in controversial areas such as this never to know when to stop.”
“At the closing stages of what has already been a very long debate, one thing has emerged very clearly: it is a thankless task indeed to be involved in issues of this sort. I would like to congratulate speakers on both sides of the argument—not necessarily both sides of the House—for the contributions they have made, most notably those who have made the point that they have friends on both sides of the argument. That is true of me as well. If I were to single out two particular speeches on opposite sides of the argument, I would first congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Lichfield (Michael Fabricant) on giving a masterclass in how to defuse a very fraught and serious subject with good humour while still making his case lucidly. I would also commend my hon.”
“I am grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way, and I apologise for missing the opening of the debate. Has any consideration been given to what should happen to the interest or other income generated by those assets during the period that they are frozen? Surely, even if the assets are not seized in the end, their owners should not benefit from anything that the assets earn during that frozen period.”
“9. What assessment he has made of the adequacy of his Department’s implementation of the lump-sum payments for war widows who previously lost their pensions after remarrying or cohabiting with another partner.”
“In return, I would like to thank Ministers for persevering with the matter in the face of many obstacles erected by the Treasury. There is just one last hurdle to surmount: the question of taxation of the ex gratia payment. As war widows’ pensions are a recognition of sacrifice and not a benefit, they are not taxed. If this ex gratia payment is taxed, some war widows will get only slightly more than half the lump sum concerned. Will my right hon. Friend use his very best endeavours to avoid that unintended and unfortunate result of an otherwise successful initiative?”
“That applies even to companies that are making no operating profit. Why should a UK charity, or a UK company, have to undertake enhanced due diligence, under money laundering and terrorist financing law, where a donor is linked to a high-risk country, whereas a political party is exempt from that duty? Political parties surely require the highest level of protection.”
“The Government claim to oppose this Lords amendment on the basis that the existing protections within electoral law are sufficient; that the amendment would not work in practice; and that it would place an undue burden on grassroots political organisations. Almost everyone else disagrees. The Government rely on the fact that existing electoral financing law requires political parties to check that a donor is “permissible”. Yet that misses the central point: the lack of any requirement for a political party to check the source of the funding. There is currently no rule that political parties must conduct adequate due diligence on donors—not even donors operating in high-risk countries. Citizens domiciled abroad and companies based in the UK can donate to a political party with no questions asked about the source of the money.”
“Members from both sides of both Houses have previously spoken strongly in support of the Lords amendment and, together with the evidence provided by the ISC, the Committee on Standards in Public Life and the Electoral Commission, have clearly set out why it is needed and why the current safeguards in our law are insufficient. By refusing to accept the need to update the law, the Government are rejecting the non-partisan conclusions of both Parliament and the Electoral Commission. They are inexplicably rejecting the opportunity significantly to improve the transparency and accountability of our political system by requiring political parties to take modest but important steps to identify and disclose donations received from foreign sources and states.”
“In 2020, the ISC’s long-delayed Russia report highlighted the risk of foreign state-linked financial interference in UK politics. There is clearly a threat that needs to be tackled. The Committee on Standards in Public Life, in a major 2021 report on regulating electoral finance, concluded that “the current rules are insufficient to guard against foreign interference in UK elections.” That committee also observed that, since 2018, the Electoral Commission has supported the introduction into electoral finance regulation of risk management principles that are used for anti-money laundering checks conducted by companies. This amendment falls into that same category.”
“Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. Lords amendment 22B, accepted by the upper House last Wednesday, 21 June, requires a UK-registered political party to publish a policy statement ensuring the identification of foreign donations and providing the Electoral Commission with an annual statement showing the foreign donations received. This is the second time that the other place has amended the Bill to include such a clause. On behalf of the ISC, I spoke in favour of the previous version of the amendment when the Bill was last in the Commons, and, as Lord West stated on Wednesday, the ISC’s position remains the same: we firmly support the introduction of this provision. It is deeply concerning that the Government continue to oppose it.”
“We know that there is both a threat and a vulnerability. We know that current safeguards are inadequate. This is a modest, sensible and proportionate amendment: the Minister should seize the opportunity by accepting it or proposing his own alternative.”
“I hope he, like us, will persevere and maybe one day that mystery will be solved. In fact, the amendment does not even represent the highest level of protection. It is a very modest measure that would not place undue burdens on political parties. The Electoral Commission says that such rules could be introduced in a way that recognises the need for proportionality, as we have heard, with different requirements depending on the size of an entity’s financial infrastructure and/or the size of the donation. Guidelines would prevent this amendment, which increases transparency and accountability, from becoming disproportionately onerous. The fact that due diligence measures are used in the charity sector, and not just by commercial entities, demonstrates that it should be entirely possible for similar steps to be taken by political parties.”
“I wonder whether the right hon. Lady, the Chairman of the Home Affairs Committee, shares the surprise that I feel when looking at the BBC’s briefing for this debate. It says that it is creating 130 additional local journalist posts, and that as part of those posts it will create a new network of 70 investigative journalists across England. I can see the value of investigative reporting, but when people such as the excellent staff of BBC Radio Solent have to go on strike over the threat to their jobs, is that the right priority that the BBC should be following?”
“The right hon. Gentleman is making such a strong case that the House deserves to hear an extra minute. Does he agree that, in our 26 years in the House, it is hard to think of an occasion when the House has been more united than on this cause? Does he agree that, although the Minister will inevitably point to the independence of the BBC in policy terms, the Minister can nevertheless perform a useful role in taking a message to the BBC that the House feels immensely strongly on this matter?”
“My hon. Friend is, indeed, a true friend and, normally, we find ourselves in the same Lobby under heavy crossfire, but I want to ask him a simple question that I would have asked my right hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg) had he found time to give way to me. Given that he is so hostile to the report of the Committee, will he do people like me a favour and divide the House today, so that we can have the opportunity to cast our vote, either against the report, as he wishes to do, or in favour of it, as I wish to do?”
“My right hon. Friend is being characteristically frank about the problems, as well as the successes, of the policy. Can anything be done to the model of financing for the maintenance of service housing that would perhaps incorporate a financial incentive on the people who have the contracts, so that if they do not arrange for repairs quickly enough, they could conceivably feel it where it hurts, in their bank balance?”
“When a despicable incident of this sort occurs, be it at the gates of Parliament or on the streets of a university town, the community looks to the security agencies to be able to investigate and establish the motives for the attack, the background of the attack and whether any other people were involved. Does the Home Secretary agree that it is therefore both important and understandable that the intelligence community has the capacity to investigate people’s online life and the high-tech companies that provide these communications services have a duty, both morally and legally, to co-operate with the security community, so that horrible episodes such as this can be fully investigated and the findings established?”
“If and when parents get sight of what their children are being taught about relationships and sex education, will they have the right to withdraw their children from such lessons if they deem the materials to be inappropriate?”
“I have a lot of time for the right hon. Gentleman, but I think his memory is playing him false. I also remember the Countryside Alliance protest marches, and I believe they were organised in full co-operation with the police. It was similar with most of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament protests on the other side of the political spectrum. We are talking here about people who act unilaterally to obstruct others from going about their lawful business. The Countryside Alliance did not do that, so far as I recall.”
“When we engage with the relevant officials directly, as we did over Ukraine, we get results. Why should we not help those people in Afghanistan, to whom we have a particular obligation, given that we were prepared to do that for those from Ukraine, towards whom we had fewer obligations but understandable sympathy?”
“That is extremely kind of you, Mrs Latham. I wish to make a single point, which I urge the Minister to take away. After the invasion of Ukraine, the Home Office set up a special unit on the parliamentary estate in Portcullis House staffed by knowledgeable and sympathetic Home Office civil servants, and it was possible for MPs to engage directly with them in support of particular cases of outstanding humanitarian worth. Why should we not reinstate that hub, which would make it easy for those of us who know of cases exactly like those just described by the hon. and learned Member for Edinburgh South West (Joanna Cherry) to feed them into the system, and would mean that there is no chance of them being delayed or ignored, and that there could be no prevarication?”
“I am very grateful to the Minister, who is a very decent man and I am sure very sympathetic to the plight of the Afghan women. Will he please take the message back to the Home Office that if it wants to claim credit, rightfully, for those schemes, it needs to create the machinery to enable right hon. and hon. Members to engage with its officials in the way that we did when we successfully engaged over Ukraine? We need that hub back. Please will he raise that point with his Home Office counterparts?”
“I have no first-hand knowledge of this particular case, but does my right hon. Friend the Minister agree that there is and should always be a difference between asking a civil servant to do something that may or may not be wrong and asking a civil servant for advice on whether doing something is or is not likely to be wrong?”
“I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Minister, for whom I have a great deal of time and respect, but it seems to me that he is talking about tinkering at the edges and improving a fundamentally unfair system. I would gently remind him of an exchange I had with the Secretary of State on 20 February this year, when I asked if there was going to be fundamental reform and he replied: “We hope, in the forthcoming King’s Speech, to introduce legislation to fundamentally reform the system. Leaseholders, not just in this case but in so many other cases, are held to ransom by freeholders. We need to end this feudal form of tenure and ensure individuals have the right to enjoy their own property fully.” —[ Official Report , 20 February 2023; Vol. 728, c. 3.] Do I detect a basic shift away from this position? I earnestly hope not.”
“I declare an interest, as both a leaseholder and the owner of one buy-to-let flat. I have the direct experience of having had a top-floor flat and having had another floor and a roof garden built above it. After all the faults came about, many of which still persist, guess who had to pay, in one case more than £200,000, for remedying them? It was the leaseholders, not the freeholder.”
“Does the Minister accept that the female population of Afghanistan is enslaved at present? Has he seen the amazing film by the courageous Sky correspondent, Alex Crawford, called “Women at War: Afghanistan”, which spells that out? Will he spare a moment to look at early-day motion 1188, marking the 90th anniversary today of the founding of the Academic Assistance Council, now the Council for At-Risk Academics? I came across that organisation while it was trying to rescue female academics from potential enslavement and bring them to this country so that they could join the faculties of the University of Southampton, among others.”