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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“Yet the fact that the US would take such a step should have been anticipated. Our belated U-turn in July shows what happens when multifaceted problems are examined in a one-dimensional way. Seven long years after our Huawei report, the Government have—in the space of a fortnight—introduced two important Bills: this one and the National Security and Investment Bill. Taken together, according to the National Cyber Security Centre, they should help to establish an “appropriately secure and resilient telecoms infrastructure” and “effect the security transformation we”— the NCSC— “believe to be necessary”. We are assured that “operators adhering in totality to the new security regime will be among the most secure in the world”.”
“Yet it rightly pointed out that “the issue cannot be viewed solely through a technical lens—because it is not simply about telecommunications equipment. This is a geostrategic decision, the ramifications of which may be felt for decades to come… It is about perception as much as anything: our Five Eyes partners need to be able to trust the UK and we must not do anything which puts that at risk… And there is the question as to whether other countries might follow the UK’s decision” when they are not as capable of protecting their networks as we are of protecting our own. Some say that the Government’s perseverance with Huawei was justified on the basis of the technical advice they were given—right up to the point earlier this year when the United States brought in its fierce further sanctions.”
“There can be no doubt of the sincerity of the technical advice given by our experts at GCHQ and, more recently, in the National Cyber Security Centre, its public-facing arm. They recognise—as does the Bill—that the lack of diverse suppliers is a critical future vulnerability. For telecommunications to be resilient, their networks need more than two providers on which to depend. Otherwise, the collapse of one provider means total reliance on the other. Yet should that really override the danger of ever-closer involvement with a company legally in thrall to potentially hostile Chinese intelligence services? In a statement in July last year, the ISC acknowledged the National Cyber Security Centre’s paradoxical point that three providers might be safer than two, even when the third comes from an adversarial state.”
“Replying to our main finding that their “duty to protect the safety and security of its citizens should not be compromised by fears of financial consequences”, the Government observed that “HMG’s approach balances economic prosperity…with national security…Boosting trade and investment is a key part of the Government’s plan for growth and we are working hard to develop our economic relationships with key trading partners, including China.” As Huawei’s chief executive officer had been given the full red-carpet treatment at 10 Downing Street only the previous September, that response was all too predictable, and thus the courtship continued, despite growing anxiety among our Five Eyes partners, such as Australia and the United States.”
“The Committee was “shocked that officials chose not to inform, let alone consult, Ministers on such an issue.” That, we concluded, must never again be allowed to happen. The Government’s July 2013 response to the report bordered on complacency. They conceded that “with hindsight, we agree that Ministers should have been informed” and put their faith in the relatively new National Security Council, in conjunction with “cross industry-government groups”, to provide better protection in future.”
“It focused on the casual and cavalier way in which contracts were signed between British Telecom and Huawei prior to any ministerial involvement, and it insisted that “The National Security Council should ensure that there are effective procedures and powers in place…when it comes to investment in the CNI.” We demanded an effective process by which Government are alerted to potential foreign investment in the CNI; an established procedure for assessing the risks; a process for developing a strategy to manage these risks throughout the lifetime of the contract and beyond; clarity as to what powers the Government have or need to have; and clear lines of responsibility and accountability.”
“It is an absolute pleasure to follow such sensible speeches from those on both Front Benches. There is a history to today’s legislation which I shall set out and against which my Committee colleagues can develop the Intelligence and Security Committee’s current perspectives. As the hon. Member for Cardiff Central (Jo Stevens) mentioned, it was in June 2013 that the Intelligence and Security Committee, on which I served under Sir Malcolm Rifkind’s chairmanship, published a no-holds-barred report on foreign involvement in the critical national infrastructure.”
“In defence of the Huawei cyber-security evaluation centre, its sixth annual report, from September this year, is absolutely devastating in its criticisms of Huawei’s failures to be secure or to make improvements when insecurities have been highlighted.”
“I did ask a few questions. If the Minister cannot answer them now, by all means he should write to me. However, I am concerned about a situation where, for example, a former leader of the Conservative party and former Prime Minister has a major role in the China belt and road funding operation. How secure will Government be against lobbying of people with that sort of connection and prominence?”
“I am sure my right hon. Friend appreciates that many elderly people die with serious illnesses, such as prostate cancer, but not from those illnesses. How certain is he that statistics showing the number of people dying with covid-19 are not being presented or misinterpreted as people dying from covid-19?”
“Thankfully, the Prime Minister is fulfilling his leadership election promise on defence spending. Given that the National Cyber Force formally announced today involves offensive cyber operations, I welcome the fact that the ISC will provide oversight of this joint MOD-GCHQ venture. Is my right hon. Friend fully satisfied that the ISC is now properly constituted to conduct this scrutiny impartially and independently?”
“It is February 1942, and half a dozen clapped-out, obsolete Swordfish biplanes take on the Scharnhorst and the Gneisenau as they sail up the English channel with enormous air cover. Of those six biplanes, all six were shot down. Five of the aircrew survived the operation and four survived the war, and one of them later became my friend: Pat Kingsmill DSO. He is typical of these people who did courageous acts that were on everyone’s lips at the time, but then went on to live quiet lives—in the case of Pat Kingsmill, as an administrator in the NHS for many years.”
“On a happier note, we turn to May 1941, when HMS Bulldog is a member of a flotilla of anti-submarine escorts that bring to the surface the U-110. My late friend, the then 20-year-old Sub-Lieutenant David Balme, heads up a rowing boat of half a dozen sailors. They get on board the U-110 submarine, which has been forced to the surface. They go down, not knowing whether the submarine will blow up from scuttling charges or whether there are people waiting armed at the foot of the conning tower ladder as they climb down, unable to defend themselves. They recover the Enigma machine and the code books and thus make a vital contribution to the winning of the battle of the Atlantic. Then we come back to the Scharnhorst and the Gneisenau.”
“In 1940, another converted passenger liner, HMS Jervis Bay, was escorting a convoy of nearly 40 ships. The Jervis Bay found herself standing between that convoy and the German pocket battleship the Admiral Scheer. The convoy was instructed to scatter, and Captain Fogarty Fegen, who was the commander of the Jervis Bay, steamed towards certain death and destruction and saved three quarters of the ships in that convoy. There was a time when the names “Rawalpindi” and “Jervis Bay” were known throughout the land, and it is important that we periodically remind ourselves of these inspirational examples where people sacrificed themselves doing the right thing, even though they knew they had little or no chance of survival.”
“The captain of HMS Rawalpindi was Captain Edward Kennedy, who was 60 years old. He had come out of retirement after his service in the first world war and between the wars to re-enlist. Rather than surrender, he took on those two deadly ships, and the Rawalpindi, as was entirely predictable, went down with all flags flying and with few survivors. I am going to develop that theme, which is that many of these events are not necessarily successful, but that does not mean that they are not ultimately setting standards for inspiring their fellow service personnel, their comrades and future generations. They certainly inspired me. We move forward from Captain Kennedy—who, incidentally, was the father of the late Sir Ludovic Kennedy—to November 1940.”
“Because we are commemorating the 75th anniversary of the end of world war two, I shall concentrate entirely on that conflict. Madam Deputy Speaker, I know that you are quietly but rightly proud of your father’s brave record of fighting in the second world war, but as the years and decades go by, fewer and fewer people have that sort of direct personal knowledge. In the limited time available, I would like to take one brief example from each year of the second world war, to try to humanise the picture a little bit for those who do not have the sort of personal connection that I just described. Let us take, for example, November 1939. A converted passenger liner, HMS Rawalpindi, found herself trapped by two of the largest and most deadly ships in the German navy: the Scharnhorst and the Gneisenau.”
“Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh), went on to work throughout many years, trying to argue for civil defence and protection for this country. Finally, Operation Meridian—the raids on the oil refineries at Palembang in Sumatra—happened in January 1945. Norman Richardson—again, a friend of mine, who sadly passed away—was commemorated on the 75th anniversary of the end of the war in the special edition of obituaries in The Daily Telegraph . He was a telegraphist air gunner. These were people who flew on a raid in January, when people in Sumatra were not expecting it, but they did not knock out all the oil refineries so they went back a few days later, when everyone was expecting them, and they did it again. They were shot down, but three quarters of Japan’s oil refining capability was lost to the Japanese war effort.”
“That is extraordinarily generous, but quite typical of the right hon. Gentleman. We come to September 1943, and three midget submarines attack the German battleship Tirpitz in a Norwegian fjord. Godfrey Place, the captain of the X7, escapes from his sinking submarine, and later becomes admiral in charge of reserves. Although he was a very important figure in the Royal Navy, he still had time to meet somebody like me—a schoolboy in Swansea, when he was there on a visit—and to autograph a book about submarine escape. These little gestures from truly great men inspire young people. We come to the last two. The airborne assault at Arnhem in September 1944 was another disaster. But Tony Hibbert MC, who later became a friend of mine through my right hon.”
“As the University of Oxford is regularly rated the finest in the world, may we have a statement from the Government ensuring that what passes for statistical analysis by the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies should in future be checked and confirmed by the Oxford Centre for Evidence Based Medicine before it is inflicted on our sceptical and suffering constituents?”
“I welcome the fact that the Government have chosen to make this statement. The attack plans of lone terrorists are obviously the hardest to anticipate, yet their behaviour often sends signals to those in their immediate circle. What advice does my right hon. Friend have for people who see worrying signs that someone they know is developing an extremist outlook?”
“I have put in three written questions about this Bill, and yesterday I had answers to them. Two of the answers were helpful, but one, on the point that the right hon. Gentleman is making, was not. I was trying to establish how many investigations had not resulted in prosecutions, and I could not seem to get an answer, yet that is central to the whole problem. The core of the problem is not the small number who get prosecuted but the large number who get investigated.”
“When the Defence Committee was looking at the matter in the previous two Parliaments, it recommended a Bill of this sort provided that the time limit was qualified by the absence of compelling new evidence. Is the hon. and gallant Gentleman saying that he does not feel that that proviso is in the Bill? If that proviso is in the Bill, if there were compelling new evidence that had not come forward in the first five years but came forward afterwards, then indeed a prosecution could proceed.”
“I agree with my right hon. Friend that the prosecution system is not out of control, but does he agree that the investigatory system is? To answer my own intervention on the hon. and gallant Member for Barnsley Central (Dan Jarvis), is my right hon. Friend aware that clause 3(2)(b) says that the five-year limit will not apply unless “compelling new evidence has become available”? Why is he not reassured by that?”
“The Chancellor will know that food and drink wholesalers —such as Harvest Fine Foods in my constituency—supply both the hospitality sector, where 70% of sales are made, and the public sector, where the other 30% are made. With the closure and reduction of much of the hospitality sector, and without any targeted Government support, wholesalers are on the verge of collapse, and, with that, the supply of food to institutions such as care homes, prisons, schools and hospitals is at immediate risk. Will he or the Financial Secretary therefore meet the Federation of Wholesale Distributors to discuss the need for business rates relief to be extended to wholesalers to prevent the dire scenario of the public sector finding—”
“How many separate covid vaccines are undergoing trials at present in the United Kingdom, and what is the planned duration of the trial period for each?”
“I warmly endorse the last intervention the hon. Gentleman took. Governments of all stripes surely have enough experience of digital disasters to know that people need to have something tangible on which they can rely if they request it and if they feel insufficiently confident that a digital system guarantees that they can prove their status.”
“In support of what the hon. Gentleman is saying, let me say that it is not that millions of these documents would have to be issued; they would be issued only to people who felt the need to request them.”
“All we are looking for is a simple table saying that these are the categories of offences that have been authorised, those are the totals in each category and this is the grand total.”
“There is a clear role for the Investigatory Powers Commissioner, and it is absolutely right that the commissioner is able to use his judicial oversight powers to ensure that those powers are used only with due care and consideration by the agencies that authorise criminal conduct. The Bill, as it stands, does not provide for any parliamentary scrutiny of the use of these authorisation powers, so the amendment that the ISC has tabled—new clause 3—proposes not to duplicate the role of the Investigatory Powers Commissioner in any way, but instead to require the Secretary of State to provide the ISC of Parliament with an annual report information on the number of criminal conduct authorisations that have been authorised by the agencies that the Committee oversees as well as on the categories authorised.”
“The Intelligence and Security Committee, as was stated on Second Reading, strongly supports the principle behind this legislation. CHIS play a vital role in identifying and disrupting terrorist plots. They save lives, often at great risk to themselves. Sometimes they must commit offences to maintain their cover, and their handlers must be able to authorise them to do so in certain circumstances and subject to specific safeguards. We welcome the Bill, which will place the state’s power to authorise that conduct on an explicit statutory footing. However, concerns were raised on Second Reading that the Bill does not provide for sufficient safeguards and oversight measures. The ISC agrees.”
“Thank you, Dame Rosie; I shall endeavour to be helpful. It is only by the good fortune, dare I say it, of there having been yet another statement on the covid crisis that many members of the Intelligence and Security Committee are able to take part in this debate at all. I have written to the Leader of the House about this, and I appeal to the Government’s business managers in future not to schedule legislation of this sort, which is directly relevant to the Intelligence and Security Committee, for the same day on which it is known that the Committee has an immovable meeting. I am grateful to the right hon. Member for North Durham (Mr Jones) for being willing to leave our main meeting early, so as to be sure that new clause 3 could be covered, and I will now make some remarks about that new clause.”
“That is absolutely right, and the whole point about the detail is that that is the job of the Investigatory Powers Commissioner. What we want to do is give an added layer of extra scrutiny on the scale and the categorisation, but nothing in terms of particularity of any individual case.”
“The hon. Gentleman, with whom I worked so closely on the Defence Committee, as always gets to the heart of the matter. He says that, indeed, we have made reference in the context of Northern Ireland to numbers and scale in precisely the way we are seeking to be able to do here. Whether something is then made public is always a matter for debate and negotiation between the ISC and the agency concerned, but where it cannot be made public, that is where the ISC in a sense comes into its own. We exist to be able to see things that for good reasons cannot be made public, but we can then at least give assurance to Parliament that we have seen what cannot be made public and we are reasonably satisfied with it, and that is what this is all about.”
“Yes. What it is important to remember and, it must be said, what has not always been remembered in recent times, are the provisions of the Justice and Security Act 2013. That Act, among other things, said that the Committee would have greater powers to “require” the agencies to give certain information. Prior to that, it could only “request” the agencies to do so. The question is: will we have the power to be assured of getting these figures, or are we going to be able only to ask for them and perhaps not get them? The right hon. Gentleman is absolutely right: if we saw something that we did not like the look of, even if we did not have the power to require that particular piece of information in order to delve further, we could at least request it. For many years, that was the only basis on which the Committee could operate anyway.”
“I look forward to the Minister’s comments on that later, and I earnestly hope we will be able to reach a satisfactory outcome.”
“That could be used as an excuse not to tell the Committee about the total of 15. In reality, I do not think that would be within the spirit of the understanding of the reasons why current operations are normally excluded from the purview of the work that the Committee does. In order for the Minister to develop the degree of trust that we wish to have in the Government’s intentions, I hope that when he comes to address the arguments that have been put forward in support of new clause 3, he will rule out any suggestion that the fact that there might be one or two current operations included in a statistic will prevent our Committee from seeing those statistics that we have urged the Government to provide by tabling the amendment.”
“I am obviously hoping that the Minister will convince us in the course of this afternoon that we can indeed trust the Government on this matter. If he wishes to do so, he needs to clear up the point I am about to raise concerning current operations. Although sometimes the Government share information voluntarily with the Committee about current operations, we cannot normally demand such information. The danger with a letter and the slight amendment to the regulations is that it could still leave a loophole whereby the Government say, “We would like to give you these statistics and these categories, but unfortunately some of them relate to operations that are still ongoing.” Perhaps there have been 15 such authorisations, and one or two of them relate to current operations.”
“I accept that assurance in good heart. In his letter, the Minister said, “Such information as is requested in order for the ISC to provide effective oversight of these policies relating to these authorisations shall be provided to the Committee,” so I take it he is saying that we will not get refused those statistics when we want them.”
“Does my hon. Friend accept that those present or former Post Office officials who perpetrated this disaster and perpetuated the agony of the victims must be punished, not promoted, and shamed, rather than rewarded with honours, as I believe happened in at least one prominent instance?”
“Can the Minister explain one difference between the situation that has applied in the past and the situation that will apply in the future if the Bill goes through as it is? We are now legislating to make properly authorised criminal conduct lawful, rather than continuing with the current position whereby MI5 or another authorising authority could argue that it would not be in the public interest for prosecuting authorities to prosecute properly authorised criminal conduct, but there is no guarantee of immunity. What we are now saying is that they are not breaking the law, rather than, as in the past, that they were breaking the law, but that it was against the public interest to prosecute. Why the reason for that change?”
“Naturally, this power must be properly circumscribed and must be used, as repeatedly stated, only where necessary and proportionate. At later stages, consideration of the Bill will surely focus on how to apply necessity and proportionality, but I urge colleagues in all parts of the House not to seek too much specificity regarding what criminality meets those standards. Preventing agents inside a criminal enterprise from engaging in a specified checklist of possible crimes would make their unmasking and potential execution very much more likely. It would be dangerously counterproductive to compile such a checklist. We need to remember that there is more than one way for society to have blood on its hands.”
“Despite necessary redactions, the 2017-19 ISC’s own report on Northern Ireland-related terrorism, presented to Parliament today, although it was drafted before I rejoined the Committee, convincingly concludes at paragraph 39 that: “While there are, rightly, concerns that criminal activity may somehow be being legitimised, the need for such authorisations is clear. What is key is that authorisations are properly circumscribed, used only where necessary and proportionate, and subject to proper scrutiny.” Like its predecessor, the current ISC believes that these authorisations are essential if innocent lives are to be saved. Indeed, we have seen real examples where precisely that has happened—and where lives would definitely have been lost if a courageous agent had been banned from participating in any criminal activity.”
“As we have heard, last December the investigatory powers tribunal ruled in favour of MI5 in a case that challenged such authorisations. However, that ruling was by just a 3-2 majority, thus illustrating the point well known to the Intelligence and Security Committee that the switch of a single vote can dramatically change even a carefully pre-planned outcome. [ Laughter. ] The ISC welcomes the principle behind the Bill to put existing powers to authorise criminal conduct, in certain circumstances, on to an explicit statutory basis. One of our predecessor Committees was told in 2016 by the then director general of MI5 that CHIS agents are “the intelligence collection asset that we could not operate without. They give you insight that technical intelligence cannot give”.”
“The explanatory notes accompanying the Bill describe the use of covert human intelligence sources as “a key tactic in protecting national security and investigating serious crime”, and the operation of such agents as “a core part of security, intelligence and policing work”. It is hard to disagree with that evaluation. If it were known that CHIS agents could never engage in criminal activity in concert with the groups they are infiltrating, it would be simplicity itself for ruthless organisations to devise techniques to flush them out and eliminate them. Until now, the security service has had an implied power, derived from the Security Service Act 1989, to authorise CHIS agents to take part in criminality.”
“The work of the United Kingdom’s domestic and overseas intelligence agencies would be considerably less complicated and decidedly less dangerous if we could rely solely on the technical triumphs that achieved so much in Room 40 in the first world war and via the Ultra organisation in the second. Sadly, that has never been the case and, as long as spying has existed, spies in human form have proven indispensable. Covert agents operate under extremely hazardous conditions inside hostile organisations, or cells of organisations, where discovery of their true identity and purpose could prove fatal.”
“Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. I shall endeavour to set a good example. Both Front Benchers have begun this debate in a solemn, sober and thoroughly non-partisan way. That is greatly to be welcomed. The Opposition Front Bench spokesman, the hon. Member for Torfaen (Nick Thomas-Symonds), referred briefly to the oversight role of the Intelligence and Security Committee. I can give advance warning, as it were, that other members of the Committee will be referring—in particular, I believe, my hon. Friend the Member for The Wrekin (Mark Pritchard)—to at least one amendment the ISC will probably put forward, relating to accountability and oversight by the ISC, at a later stage in these proceedings.”
“Does the Secretary of State accept that the primary problem is not repeated prosecution, but repeated reinvestigation? The Bill does little to rule that out. With the sorts of case that he has outlined, the problem has been the innumerable investigations. They are what were so traumatic for the troops, not the tiny number of prosecutions. As the former Attorney General for Northern Ireland says: “Nothing in the Bill limits the investigation of offences—even outside the period of five years…The Bill impliedly contemplates the possibility of multiple investigations.” That, I am afraid, is where the Bill falls down.”
“That report warned that the European Court of Human Rights “has gone far beyond the original understanding of the European Convention on Human Rights, and… its rulings have stretched the temporal and territorial scope of the Human Rights Act beyond Parliament’s original intentions”. The report examined proposals by Professor Richard Ekins, now professor of law and constitutional government at Oxford University, in which he proposed to restore the former scope of the HRA and the application of the ECHR. As long as that legislation, which was never intended to be applied abroad when it was enacted by this House in 1998, persists in its extended application, we will not solve this problem.”
“The effect of that was to interest me in trying to take the matter further during the two periods for which I chaired the Defence Committee. In those two periods, we produced three reports. The first inquiry was carried out by the sub-Committee under the chairmanship of my hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth, Moor View (Johnny Mercer), now the Minister for Defence People and Veterans. That inquiry dealt with Iraq and reported in February 2017. The second one dealt with Northern Ireland and reported in April 2017. The third one, dealing with the whole panorama of all these scenarios, reported in July 2019.”
“The Secretary of State conceded that only a small proportion of these many cases—most of them spurious—end up in a prosecution. He suggested that, if it were known that there would be less likelihood of a prosecution, there might be fewer rounds of investigation and reinvestigation, but I am afraid I do not find that wholly or, indeed, at all convincing. Something must be done to stop the repeated reinvestigations, which, in large part, happen because of the application of the Human Rights Act abroad. I first became aware of the scale of this problem several years ago when I heard speeches from my hon. and gallant Friends the Members for Beckenham (Bob Stewart) and for Filton and Bradley Stoke (Jack Lopresti).”