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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“I seem to recall that the previous title of CST was the Defence Department of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, so if CST is being accused of being an agent of the Israeli Government, presumably the accuser is saying the same about the Board of Deputies of British Jews. That gets pretty close to antisemitism in my book.”
“I supported the requirement for people working with vulnerable people in care homes to be vaccinated or, if they would not be vaccinated, to be removed from direct contact with vulnerable people. Can the hon. Gentleman tell me—I did not get a chance to ask the Secretary of State—whether this proposal for members of the NHS who have not been vaccinated will affect only frontline staff who interact with the vulnerable, or whether it will apply to people throughout the NHS who might have no contact with the vulnerable? That will affect the way I cast my vote today.”
“I know my right hon. and hon. Friends in the ministerial team are doing their best, but is there any encouragement they can give, perhaps in conjunction with the Treasury, to the women of the Women Against State Pension Inequality Campaign who lost out on the state pension start age?”
“There is always a danger that an entire institution will be damaged by the failures of a few. However, what action will be taken against officers who are found guilty of such an abysmal failure of investigation and drive? If action is not taken, does that not create a narrative that there is something wrong with the institution as a whole?”
“It has been suggested more than once that, when deaths with covid are announced each day, it should simultaneously be stated how many of them were of unvaccinated people or of people with underlying health conditions or other specific vulnerabilities. Will the Secretary of State now undertake to do that? Did he notice, as I and no doubt others did, that the Prime Minister said this morning that one person in the UK had died with omicron, but the shadow Secretary of State said the death was a result of the virus. Does the Secretary of State know which version is correct?”
“I am glad to be such a cause of pleasure to my hon. and gallant Friend. I am not a lawyer, so this might be entirely irrelevant, but I do not think so: before he leaves this first amendment, could he say whether those serious cases of murder abroad, such as has been reported in relation to an incident in Kenya some years ago—I appreciate that that case may still be live—are affected by this tussle between the upper House and this House on the question of whether such matters should be considered by court martial or civilian court? In other words, where there is a failure of the local police in another country, is it the Government’s case that the court martial system or the civilian legal system is better able to deal with it?”
“If bed capacity is the problem, were we right to close the Nightingale wards, and are they available for reopening? If so, does he expect to have to reopen them?”
“Am I right in thinking that these very patriotic individuals are seeking the right to come here if they need to in case of future discrimination? They are not necessarily all likely to have to take up that right.”
“Of the 16 Afghan scholars sponsored by the Council for At-Risk Academics, 10 remain trapped in Afghanistan; four, with the welcome help of the Home Office, have managed to come to the UK; and two remain waiting for visas—one of them in hiding. Will it be possible for the Ministers to co-ordinate efforts with the Home Office to ensure that those who have paid-for studentships in the UK get their visas as soon as possible?”
“The Secretary of State, like me, has been in the House a long time. Does he agree that this scandal measures up to some of the worst that we have seen, whether it be contaminated blood or the wrongful jailing of innocent postmasters? While I welcome his change of tone, does he agree that people are constantly paying out colossal sums for things such as waking watch, and that this must be remedied?”
“As someone who, very thankfully, received his booster jab last Thursday at the outstanding St Thomas’ Hospital, may I ask the Secretary of State why certain groups and communities seem to fear vaccination? Which are those groups and communities, and what can be done to persuade them that they are wrong?”
“I am very encouraged to hear that my right hon. Friend is so forward-looking on this matter. May I ask him to explain to the House how one rather backward step took place some months ago, which was the allowing of it to become routine that additional storeys could be added to existing blocks of flats? I have lived through that experience and found not only that it is terrible to have a floor inserted above you, but that when things go horribly wrong with the construction and the company goes bust or winds itself up, it is the leaseholders who have to pay thousands upon thousands of pounds to put right the faults. Would he not like to revisit that change that was made and perhaps suggest that it ought to be looked at again?”
“Did not the hon. Member for Nottingham South (Lilian Greenwood) put her finger on the problem when she referred to Afghanistan, where there are many legitimate asylum seekers who deserve to come here? Is not the problem that if we have the fairest asylum seeking system in the world, a queue will form and that there will always be some people who are not prepared to queue, but want to jump to the head of the queue? Therefore, is not the only way to deter that to show, not that they will not get across the channel or that getting across the channel is terribly dangerous, but that if they do get across the channel and if they have jumped the queue, they will be returned to another country? How can the Home Secretary secure that?”
“I am a huge admirer of my hon. Friend and of the work she does in this field. I am trying to help a Hazara Afghan woman who successfully got into Pakistan undocumented, but even now she has to remain in hiding lest our Pakistani “friends and allies” discover her and send her back to the tender mercies of the Taliban. Is that not a good illustration of what my hon. Friend is talking about?”
“Like the Home Secretary and many other Members of this House, I am the descendant of immigrants who came to this country legally. I am campaigning for more immigrants to be brought here legally who are at risk in Afghanistan. What I cannot understand is how people who come here illegally—particularly those who, having done that, commit very serious crimes—cannot then be deported because they apparently have absolute rights conferred by various conventions. Most rights are capable of being overridden in extreme circumstances. If we are signed up to such conventions, is it not about time we reviewed them?”
“I happen to agree that there is a question of proportionality on the alleged nanny state issues, but does my hon. Friend agree that where an issue is contentious—such as the fluoridation of water supplies, which has been contentious over many years in this House—it should be properly debated before the state takes control of it, not just tucked away at the end of a very long Bill? That causes me concern.”
“Would the Minister be as surprised as I was to know that quite a lot of Members of this House are completely unaware that that provision has been added at the end of the Bill?”
“I am sorry to be unhelpful to my right hon. Friend, but if this element is so integral to the overall package, why was it not brought forward right at the beginning?”
“I congratulate the hon. Member for Liverpool, Riverside (Kim Johnson) on securing this urgent question, but does my right hon. Friend agree that it should not really have been necessary for her to seek it? Inevitably, there are going to be speculations in the media about an incident as serious as this. No one appreciates the pressures on Home Office Ministers in particular more than the Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament, but can he please take the message back that, when something like this happens, even if there is not much to be said, it ought to be said to this House in the first instance, at the first available opportunity?”
“Does my right hon. Friend accept that Pakistan, with its deplorable record of support for the Taliban, is a hostile environment for a number of people who have fled Afghanistan and are hiding in Pakistan? If the British Government decide to issue visas to people who are taking refuge or in hiding in Pakistan, will he guarantee that they are safely able to get from Pakistan to the United Kingdom?”
“After the downfall of the Soviet Union, it was discovered that various multilateral agreements that we thought we had over things such as biological weapons had been systematically flouted. What confidence can we have if open societies observe the rules but closed societies cheat? Is there a regime in play to make sure that we would discover that?”
“I will simply say, on ensuring that there is ISC scrutiny of the classified elements that follow from this legislation, that arguments have been advanced by the Government in the other place to say, “Well, the face of the Bill isn’t the place to do it.” We agree with that now; we are taking the Government at their word. Therefore, we have written to the National Security Adviser and asked him to take up the issue with the Prime Minister, so that the memorandum of understanding between the Prime Minister and the ISC can be brought up to date to cater for the provisions of this Bill and the earlier Bill that should be part of our purview. That is what the Government promised in 2013 when the legislation was originally put through, for our Committee’s powers, and it is a promise that we expect them to keep.”
“Therefore, like the Chairman of our parallel Committee, I will not be voting against Lords amendment 4 tonight. Where does that leave us as a Committee in terms of the two Bills and the amendments thereto? You may recall, Mr Deputy Speaker, that there have been intense arguments both in this place and in the upper House about the failure of the Government to accept amendments that would allow the Intelligence and Security Committee to scrutinise closely the secret aspects that are inevitably involved in those two Bills. I will not digress on this both because I lack time and because you, Mr Deputy Speaker, would instantly call me to order.”
“We agreed—it is interesting how closely our deliberations, without consultation, conformed to the views of the Chairman of the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Solihull (Julian Knight)—that it was, as he put it, a case of gilding the lily, because whenever a serious objection is raised on security grounds by one of the Five Eyes partners, we take that with the utmost seriousness. That leaves us with Lords amendment 4. For the life of us, we cannot understand why the Government are opposing it. We believe it would strengthen parliamentary scrutiny and provide a valuable annual stocktake on the progress being made on the diversification strategy and how it is helping to improve national security.”
“It is a pleasure to follow all the Back-Bench speeches so far. I would like to blaze in capital letters what the Minister said: “This is, first and foremost, a national security Bill.” Something very similar was said when the National Security and Investment Bill—now the National Security and Investment Act 2021—was going through this House and the other place earlier this year. The Intelligence and Security Committee is, as it always has been, a non-partisan organisation. I will therefore be saying some things to please and, probably, to annoy both sides. The Committee considered the five amendments at a recent meeting. We agreed that the entirety of Lords amendments 1 to 3 was broadly beneficial. We looked at Lords amendment 5 and we understood the temptation to flag up the importance of the Five Eyes relationship.”
“My hon. Friend is making a fascinating case, because I, like many other Members of the House, I am sure, thought that this problem had largely been solved. Why does he think it is that the Government or the Department find it is so difficult to grip this? I recall having back surgery 35 years ago and being very grateful for some pain relief. I asked whether I could have some more, but I was told, “No, you can’t, because it is morphia. It is related to heroin and you might get addicted.” If it was possible properly to prescribe something related to heroin for a proper medical condition 35 years ago, why can something similar by way of the arrangements needed not be sorted out for this particular problem?”
“I have been looking at the Hansard of yesterday’s debate—there is an opportunity for the Minister to refer to it when she makes her remarks—and I see that one of the main points she made yesterday was the fact that there is insufficient evidence on the safety aspects and the possible harm effects. Given that families are paying all this money and finding other ways of getting the cannabis-based products, would it be a way forward if families were asked to sign a waiver if it were prescribed, so that the people doing the prescribing would be protected against any subsequent action if in fact something went wrong? It might be for the family to take that decision on the balance of benefit and harm.”
“That argument would surely carry more weight if the people doing the testing outlined some sort of timeline and plan for concluding a testing programme, rather than apparently letting things drift on aimlessly for years on end.”
“The Minister is doing a first-rate job for students in promoting freedom of speech on campus. Does she agree, however, that it would not help students to recover from everything they have been going through and everything they have lost during the pandemic if they faced the prospect of having to pay back already excessive student loans at a lower threshold? Does she also agree that too many universities have become academically indiscriminate cash cows for overpaid university administrators?”
“I realise that the Government can do much more for at-risk Afghan women who have managed to cross the border and are outside the country. One thing they can do for at-risk Afghans who are still in Afghanistan is link the provision of extra aid with their not being persecuted. How explicit are we making that link? How strongly are we exploiting that leverage?”
“The Minister is one of the nice guys in Parliament and richly deserved his promotion. What he did not deserve was to be put in this position by an untenable policy. I have to ask him the question: why is it important, right or necessary to share Budget information with the media before it is shared with this House, where it can be subjected to proper scrutiny, and will he give an undertaking on behalf of the Treasury team to stop doing it?”
“The Minister has been very accessible, and I have had conversations with him over this issue, but I am still not clear what people can do if they have already been stung with costs in respect of remediation. To go to a tribunal is a gamble, because legal costs may be incurred. Can he give further thought in his approach to this matter to how to get money back for people who have wrongly been charged when they are merely innocent leaseholders?”
“I really sympathise with the Minister, who is trying to pick up the pieces left behind by the US Administration’s appalling behaviour in withdrawing from Afghanistan so suddenly and with so little regard for the people left behind. With regard to the people in Afghanistan who are most at risk and therefore cannot show themselves easily to the authorities without risking extreme persecution, is her Department giving special thought to how they might be catered for, perhaps separately from the more routine—if I dare use that word—cases that are currently being dealt with, under the proposed new scheme?”
“What do we know about the ideological make-up of the military coup plotters? In particular, what is the relationship, if any, between them and the quite strong Islamist movement within Sudan?”
“Can the Minister tell the House roughly how many British dual nationals are being held captive in Iran, and how many of them chose to go there after the ordeal of this poor lady began so many years ago? What advice would he give to any British dual nationals thinking of going to Iran in the future?”
“May I draw particular attention to the wise words of the Home Secretary in what I think was her penultimate point about the discussion of security measures that MPs decide they will or will not take? Most right hon. and hon. Members have ideas about ways in which their security can be improved. It is very unwise—is it not, Mr Speaker?—for us to state what those ideas are in public. I am sure that, like me, every Member present in the Chamber was contacted by local and national media asking, “How are you going to proceed in future? Are you going to continue with face-to-face surgeries? What changes will you make to your arrangements?” Does the Home Secretary agree that it is quite inappropriate for the media to ask such questions, and it is quite counterproductive, and indeed self-endangering, for us to answer them?”
“Internet banking constantly asks customers if they are sure they wish to proceed. Surely it would not be too difficult to have an automated reminder or check, if it looks as if an email of a sensitive nature is going to be sent to multiple recipients? In that connection, I have here a printed list of 70 former long-term employees on British contracts in Afghanistan. I propose to hand it to the excellent new Parliamentary Private Secretaries to the Defence ministerial team. When I am informed of a secure address to which I can send it electronically, I will be happy to do so.”
“Friend agree that we ought to be very careful not only of Russians who come to this country with poison but of Russians who come to this country with funds with which they hope to make investments that allow them to get a handhold on our critical national infrastructure, which we should resist at all costs?”
“I am sure the whole House welcomes the fact that the Home Secretary has chosen to come here today to volunteer this statement. It should not come as a surprise to anyone that the links firmly associating these murderous activities with the Russian state have been made clear. Does my right hon. Friend recall that, a few days after the death of Alexander Litvinenko in November 2006, the BBC published an account of how the upper House of the Russian Parliament, the Federation Council, had adopted a new law in the previous July that the BBC said “formally permits the extra-judicial killings abroad of those Moscow accuses of ‘extremism’”? As we know, one of the suspected killers later became a Russian Member of Parliament. In the light of this brazenness and shamelessness, does my right hon.”
“Given that long-term nation building from the ground up is not a feasible option in the future, and given that terrorist attacks could happen again, will the Secretary of State institute a serious review of counter-terrorism strategy, possibly based on pre-positioned forces in regional bases, to follow an active containment strategy?”
“Will the Secretary of State inform the House what Members should do when they are contacted by people who have been of assistance to our armed forces in Afghanistan but whom they have reason to believe the Taliban are hunting? Is there any help that we will be able to give them, and how should we go about approaching the Government to secure that help?”
“As Russia completes its sinister Nord Stream 2 pipeline and tightens its stranglehold on gas supplies to Europe, why are we not fully exploiting Rolls-Royce modular nuclear reactors to decrease our indirect dependence on Russian gas and our direct dependence on French and Chinese nuclear technology?”
“Members on both sides of the House are fighting the corner for deserving Afghans whom we want to save. The Minister has just said that the Nowzad animal charity staff, who were not ARAP people and not British citizens, have been given safe passage, having got to the border. Does that mean that the Afghan citizens resettlement scheme is now up and running, because we have all got good cases that qualify just as much as those worthy people do for immediate help and rescue?”
“It is entirely up to Select Committee Chairmen to decide whether they want to mount a joint inquiry or join a Joint Committee, but what cannot be part of any such joint inquiry is the adoption by another Committee of the ISC’s raison d’être: namely, scrutiny of the activities of the intelligence community and the classified material on which those activities were based.”
“There are very good reasons for safeguarding the role of the ISC against such interference, and they were spelled out in detail and strongly supported by the Opposition parties during the lively debates in both Houses on the National Security and Investment Bill. Colleagues will be relieved to know that I do not propose to reiterate those arguments today, but the argument for letting the ISC get on with its work steadily and objectively, without being undercut by other bodies not equipped to do it, is as irrefutable now as it was when it was deployed in the context of that Bill earlier this year.”
“When such assessments are received, we shall consider them carefully and then determine any future action to take. Until that has happened, the ISC will not be commenting on what such intelligence may contain, as it is not our role to prejudge the situation on the basis of media speculation and in the absence of primary factual material. In recent months, the official Opposition have been very supportive of the right of the ISC to fulfil its role, set out in statute and in an associated memorandum of understanding, as the only Committee of parliamentarians cleared and equipped properly to deal with highly-classified intelligence material. If other Committees seek to do this, they will, for a start, require secure premises and specially vetted staff comparable to our own.”
“A dozen of them are still in Afghanistan, three of them have made it to Pakistan and one has even made it to the Netherlands, preparatory to coming here. I do not feel that I can concentrate on that because, unfortunately, the Opposition motion is framed in terms of setting up a: “Joint Committee to Investigate Withdrawal from Afghanistan” I am reading from the Annunciator there. With the greatest respect to the Opposition, may I say that that was a mistake? Late last month, it was announced on the website of the Intelligence and Security Committee—that is the hat I now have to wear—that we had “requested from the Government any intelligence assessments which covered the outlook for the regime with regards to the final withdrawal of US and coalition forces from Afghanistan”.”
“That harrowing account by the right hon. Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Liam Byrne) puts me in mind of what happened to my family in Nazi-occupied Poland for 20 months during the second world war, when they could come out from a bunker under a barn only at night, to be fed by the Polish family who risked their lives to save them. This debate ought to be about what the Scottish National party spokesman, the hon. Member for Stirling (Alyn Smith), rightly summarised when he said, “Get people out and keep people safe.” That is why I am a little disappointed that I do not feel that I can concentrate on cases such as the ones I have raised before, those of the 16 academics being supported by the Council for At-Risk Academics. These people have places—visiting fellowships and research studentships—in British universities.”
“To conclude, the position is perfectly clear, according to law, and we shall continue, gently but firmly, to hold the Government and the intelligence agencies properly to account.”
“I would have thought that it should come within the compass of the existing Government schemes to classify someone, providing the Government can satisfy themselves that what that person says he has to offer is genuine, and to activate a plan to take advantage of any real intelligence material that someone in that position might be able to offer. Unfortunately, of course, as a result of the chaotic departure that has been forced on America’s allies by successive American Presidents, the wherewithal to secure the safety of anybody inside Afghanistan, and particularly someone whom the Taliban are actively hunting, will be very difficult through any overt scheme. It would have to be done by some form of covert means, on which I hope the Government are working but on which I would not expect them to comment publicly.”