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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“Although the Foreign Secretary has given a very full account of the representations made to the American authorities, he has not given any narrative of what the American authorities said in return, in justification of their behaviour. Can he throw any light on what their attitude and excuses are, and can he at least confirm that it had nothing to do with the nature of this lady’s husband’s job?”
“I am sorry to disagree with my friend the Minister, but saying, “Oh well, it is only a withdrawal of 50 people” is like saying, “Oh, well, it is only the withdrawal of HMS Endurance before the invasion of the Falkland Islands.” Is it not a fact that if the green light is given to Turkey, under its Islamist regime, to attack our allies, it will be an act of treachery and betrayal not dissimilar to what happened in 1944 when Stalin basically gave the green light to Hitler to crush the Warsaw uprising?”
“I accept everything that the Minister just said, but does he accept that successive Governments, despite their best efforts, failed to get the message across to enough people that the retirement age for women was rising exponentially? Will the Government try to look at some of the proposals from people such as Baroness Altmann for ways in which alternative schemes could mitigate the problems that have resulted?”
“My hon. Friend the Minister had a strong outing on this subject on 26 September—a date that I happen to remember. Today, I noticed a subtle difference in his wording, as he talked about our leaving with a deal or being “prepared” to leave without a deal on 31 October. Will he confirm not only that we are prepared to leave without a deal on 31 October but that we will actually leave without a deal on 31 October, unless we have deal?”
“In the middle of last month, it emerged that yet another person, Kylie Moore-Gilbert, a Cambridge-educated British-Australian academic, has been banged up in Iran, probably as a hostage for something as yet officially unspoken, for anything up to a year of a 10-year sentence for spying, so-called. Are there any other cases, without going into specifics, of which the Government are aware of people being held hostage in this way? Given the track record from the earliest days of the Islamic revolution in Iran of taking hostages and using them for nefarious purposes, what advice does the Foreign Office give to British dual nationals and others about the wisdom or otherwise of visiting that country?”
“Following directly the point that was just made by the SNP spokesman, is there any evidence that the Chinese intelligence services, adopting classic communist methodology, are trying to discredit the protesters by infiltrating them with agents provocateurs, where the violent fringe is concerned? Will my right hon. Friend give special consideration to about 265 former members of the Hong Kong armed services, who should in the past have been offered the choice of a British passport but, I believe, have yet to receive that offer?”
“Do we have a policy of using our large international aid budget as a means of incentivising other countries to improve their climate change policies?”
“I get the impression that my hon. Friend is on his peroration, so I cannot resist adding a historical footnote on the Lisbon treaty. When a number of us argued that we ought to have a referendum on the Lisbon treaty in the United Kingdom, one party said that we should not have a referendum on that—we should have an in/out referendum on our membership of the European Union. That party was the Liberal Democrats. Where are they on that position today?”
“Given that three of the most distinguished lawyers in the country, including the Master of the Rolls and the Lord Chief Justice, found in the lower court that the Government’s case was entirely correct, can the Attorney General enlighten puzzled non-lawyers like me as to why not even one out of 11 Supreme Court judges could be found to agree with them?”
“Was there a plan equivalent to Operation Yellowhammer back in 2016 to deal with the widely predicted run on the pound and financial catastrophe if the country dared to vote for Brexit, and is there any reason to believe that our current worst-case scenario is any more likely to materialise than that which applied three years ago?”
“Do the Government accept that when we are dealing with two adversarial powers, both influential and both in the grip of religious fanaticism, the best policy we can adopt is one of the traditional balance of power, making sure that neither becomes too strong, but not fooling ourselves that the enemy of my enemy is necessarily my friend?”
“When the Prime Minister eventually wins an overall majority at the next general election, will he make it a priority of his first majority Government to repeal forthwith the ghastly Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011?”
“I apologise for intervening so soon after entering the Chamber, but as the Secretary of State has just referred to my amendment, I will take that liberty. Will he just acknowledge one thing? When the Defence Committee recommends a qualified statute of limitations, in the absence of compelling new evidence, on the question of the pursuit of people long after the events concerned, does he accept that that is not the same as an amnesty and should not be ruled out in the same way as people do rule out an amnesty?”
“Will the Secretary of State confirm that there are no circumstances, including a no-deal Brexit, under which the British Government would erect a hard border on the island of Ireland?”
“In how many third-world countries are girls like Malala at risk of attack or assassination, and do we have any programmes to assist the Governments in those countries to protect them?”
“May we have a statement or debate on the circumstances of the seizure of a British-flagged tanker by Iran in the Gulf? If there is not enough time for that, will the Leader of the House have a word with the Secretary of State for Defence, because the Defence Committee on Monday has a session planned, but the former Secretary of State—my right hon. Friend the Member for Portsmouth North (Penny Mordaunt)—has so far not yet received the information that she requires from the Ministry of Defence to enable her to give testimony to us?”
“Q8. I should like to ask a well-behaved Question 8 on the National Security Adviser. For what reasons the roles of Cabinet Secretary and National Security Adviser were merged; and if he will make it his policy to separate those roles.”
“I hope that my right hon. Friend is not going to follow every policy adopted by his predecessor. This is one that he should not follow. The Defence Committee needs to take evidence from the National Security Adviser on the failure to anticipate the Iranians’ reaction to the British seizure of a tanker. It is hardly likely, however, that the Cabinet Secretary will come before the Defence Committee, so would it not make sense to have a full-time occupant of the post of National Security Adviser as soon as possible so that Select Committees and the National Security Committee can do our jobs properly?”
“This was the idea that, yes, if we could get more people back in society, so that they could make their own way and live their lives freely and without having to be in-patients, the very existence of a network of permanent establishments—albeit for other purposes—meant that there were always plenty of opportunities, so that if somebody felt that a trough was coming they could seek help easily for, as it were, almost a top-up of treatment, just for a few days. That would then set them back on track and it meant that they would not suffer—”
“It was the Southern Health NHS Foundation Trust, which later became notorious in the mental health sphere for other reasons, that forced through the closure of all these beds, and the system has been rammed and overflowing, and under excessive pressure, ever since. There was another knock-on effect of the swinging of the pendulum too far back from the correct policy of closing the larger asylums, and that was that, by having fewer permanent facilities, we lost the ability to have what was technically—or maybe not very technically—known as the “revolving door”.”
“It has to be said that, for once, this is not the responsibility or fault of Government, because after the closure of so many of the large asylums, the pendulum—in my opinion, and I am not an expert; I have to say that I am not a medical doctor—swung too far the opposite way. I remember, in the New Forest area, having to fight a bitter campaign—which ultimately failed—to prevent a 35% reduction in in-patient beds in acute units. If I remember correctly, two of five units were closed. We were prepared to compromise and say, “Close one of the two units. Close 16 of the beds, rather than 32, and see how you get on,” but the authorities would not listen and they forced the closures through.”
“Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark about the level of danger of sexual assault among in-patients, because for quite a number of years I and various other colleagues waged a campaign to abolish mixed-sex wards in mental health in-patient facilities. At first there was talk of separate bays, if I recall correctly, which by no means would have answered the necessities of the problem. And successive Governments kept saying that they would do it, and even that they had done it, so it is particularly disturbing to hear about the level of concern that still exists about this issue. The question of inadequate numbers of beds has already been touched upon by the hon. Gentleman.”
“They have already been touched upon, at least in part, in the excellent opening speech that we have all heard. My particular concern was the need for there to be separate therapeutic environments for people who had to be admitted to acute units who suffered from very different types of mental illness. In other words, the idea that somebody suffering from acute depression should be cheek-by-jowl with somebody suffering regular psychotic outbursts was obviously a recipe to make a very serious situation even worse. While I was doing the research for that debate, it was drawn to my attention by staff at acute units that their particular nightmare was the thought of what would happen if there was inadequate staffing coupled with mixed-sex wards. I was really rather shocked and shaken today to hear the statistics cited by the hon.”
“For example, when I became a Member of this House in 1997, I came second in the private Member’s Bill ballot. I chose to introduce the Mental Health (Amendment) Bill, which was designed to achieve improvements for people who suffered catastrophic breakdowns such that they needed to be admitted to acute mental health units. At that time, the person who came first in the ballot chose to address a subject of massive national importance, namely the banning of hunting with hounds, and I could not help but notice the contrast between the packed main Chamber on the Friday that was considering the welfare of foxes and the rather more thinly occupied main Chamber a week later, as was customary, when we were trying to consider the welfare of human beings. It was ever thus. The points at issue then are, to some extent, still points at issue now.”
“Thank you, Ms Buck, for calling me so early in this debate. I am sure that I speak for everybody who listened to the remarkable speech of the hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Neil Coyle) when I say that it was a privilege to do so. We should all be immensely grateful to him for illustrating the important policy points that he had to make by means of his agonising experiences in his immediate family in his very early years. We all thank him for it. Given how many hon. Members wish to contribute, I will speak very briefly. I note that the hon. Gentleman’s speech was briefly interrupted by some shouting outside the Chamber to do with Brexit; it seems to be a common theme that mental health debates tend to happen at times when they are overshadowed by other issues.”
“I am delighted to see the hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark indicating his agreement. It meant that they would not then suffer a much worse breakdown, which would have meant that they would have to be incarcerated, for want of a better word, for a much longer period.”
“Our idea is based on the fact that those who suffer injury in combat situations have experienced a peculiar and unique form of trauma, different from those that ordinary mental health professionals can be expected to understand. I am sure that my hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Plymouth, Moor View (Johnny Mercer) will want to expand on that topic, if he is lucky enough to catch the Chair’s eye. We believe that there is a case for a national centre of excellence, and that the welfare of members of our armed services who suffer mental injury should be no less important to us than the welfare of those who suffer other, physical forms of injury in the cause of defending our freedom.”
“The Select Committee on Defence, which I have the honour of chairing, has been recommending for some time that we establish a centre of excellence for the mental injuries suffered by those who put their life on the line to defend this country, preferably alongside the national centre for physical rehabilitation at Stanford Hall. We have now raised this issue twice with the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, who has given us a reasonably encouraging response. However, once again, we feel that he is coming up against resistance because of the philosophy that people must be treated locally when at all possible, not admitted as in-patients in centralised locations. That is causing a pushback against our idea.”
“Mental hospitals must be places where patients feel safe: there have been numerous allegations of staff members being abusive, provocative and/or intimidating. 5. Use of force should be absolutely minimised. This includes physical restraint, seclusion, or forced medication. 6. A reduction in ‘sectioning’. 7. A reduction in stigma”— and finally: “8. All aspects of the Mental Health Service should be more open, and subject to independent scrutiny from time to time.” I will conclude by making one left-field observation relating to the armed forces.”
“This week, I received a letter from Lara’s mother, who asked me to attend this debate. I can do no better than to read from what she says, not so much about what happened to her daughter but about the continued interest that she has in the workings of the mental health services. She says that she would like to make her own recommendations; given what happened so tragically in her immediate family, we owe it to her to give serious consideration to those recommendations, which are as follows: “1. The 1983 Act should be revised to prioritise the dignity of individuals who come to be in the Service’s orbit. 2. Such individuals should have their values and world views respected and have a significant say in the manner of their treatment. 3. They should have the option to refuse certain treatments. 4.”
“The rather unsatisfactory answer that I received at the time was that the responsibility lay with the local medical authorities to ensure that the central guidelines were implemented. As I say, that was at the end of 2010, so it was a long time ago. I wonder whether the Minister will be able to reassure me that there is now more central direction. In the case of Lara and her parents there was inadequate sharing of vital information, under the mistaken belief that patient confidentiality trumped the fact that an adult patient was incapable of making her own decisions. I would like to know whether that situation has been rectified, or whether we are still dependent on local medical institutions and authorities to apply a central guideline that ought to be better known.”
“Sadly, their daughter—who was called Larissa but known as Lara—had taken her own life in 2006. For two years prior to that, the medical authorities had refused to share information about her with her parents; because she was an adult in her thirties, they refused to share vital information about her suicidal thoughts with her parents, on the grounds of patient confidentiality. It subsequently turned out that there were very good guidelines that said that such information should be shared. So, I wrote to the then Minister with responsibility for care services, the hon. Member for Bury South (Mr Lewis), saying that there was clearly a breakdown in the system if adequate rules existed but were not being put into practice locally.”
“I mentioned the first occasion, when I tried to introduce my private Member’s Bill in December 1997 and it was overshadowed by foxhunting. On a second occasion—on 9 December 2010, to be precise—I had secured an Adjournment debate on what happens about the information that is given to someone’s nearest and dearest when an adult is sectioned and goes into an acute unit. That occasion was on the day of the key debate about the trebling of student tuition fees, so once again we found mental health being somewhat upstaged by other matters that were of national importance. However, that is no reason not to persist or not to continue to try and emphasise to Ministers how these issues will never go away until they are finally tackled. On that occasion in December 2010, I raised the case of the daughter of my constituents, Mr and Mrs Edgell.”
“If there are some people who need to go in for a considerable period of time, and hopefully there are a lot more people who do not need to be admitted to acute units at all, it follows almost logically that there will be some people who are on the borderline between the two, who can get by in society with a degree of self-awareness—either their own or that of their immediate family—and that when the warning signs appear, provided there is that network of specialist care with beds for very short-term stays, they can receive what I call a “top-up”, or, if we were talking about servicing a vehicle, something that will prevent a much greater collapse from happening later, with all the consequent horrors. The question of what happens when people are admitted to acute units arose on a second occasion.”
“The hon. Lady is absolutely right, as long as we recognise that what is needed is a range of facilities. Even the most ardent advocate of doing away with in-patient beds would, if pressed, admit that there will always be some people who at some point absolutely need to have some in-patient treatment.”
“Can the Minister tell us in simple terms what the situation is regarding the continuation or discontinuation of mixed-sex wards in mental health acute units?”
“The Minister says that that seems extremely sensible but if, for example, somebody is seriously mentally ill and imagines that their parents mean them harm when they are actually doing everything they can in support, should the parents be locked out from knowing what is happening to their child?”
“I quite agree, but my debate was nearly nine years ago. Is it not a bit late in the day for the Government to say, “Well, we are having a conversation about this?” At the time, there seemed to be some quite sensible rules, but the main problem was that the local mental health authorities were not applying them. If anything, it seems that we are further away from our objectives than we were nine years ago.”
“I hesitate to intervene one last time. I fully accept the Minister’s point about abusive partners, but what if the person is desperately, seriously ill and delusional, and the mother is not allowed to be told information about their offspring, because they are technically an adult? At what point do you decide that the person has lost capacity to identify correctly with whom information should or should not be shared?”
“I thank the Prime Minister for the letter that he sent to the Defence Committee earlier this month, pledging what he called “an absolute commitment to fund defence fully”. Does he accept that events in the Gulf have cruelly illustrated the fact that the size of the Royal Navy is now way below critical mass? Will he join the Defence Committee in wishing to reverse the reckless reduction in defence spending by successive Governments from 3.1% of GDP in the 1990s to just 1.8% in like-for-like terms today?”
“Sailing independently and separately meant that one or more were bound to be seized.”
“Does the Foreign Secretary accept that the taking of hostages and the flouting of international law have been the signature strategy of Iran ever since the Islamic revolution in 1979? If he does accept that, was it not entirely predictable—and, indeed, predicted—that by impounding this Iranian ship, however legally justified that was, the consequence would be an attempt to retaliate by grabbing a British vessel? What consideration was given, before the original decision was taken, to the adequacy of the number of ships in the Gulf, either ours or those of our allies? What attempts were made to persuade vessels that had to navigate the strait that they should do so in small convoys, which would at least enable two, or at most three, frigates to protect a larger number of ships?”
“We would be mad to enter into a direct security relationship with the agencies of a totalitarian communist state.”
“Does the Secretary of State accept that the phrase “manageable risk” is almost a contradiction in terms, because if it were fully manageable, it would not be a risk? Is he not absolutely right not to be taking a decision with such profound security implications for our future in the dying few hours of an outgoing prime ministerial Administration? Finally, does he accept that unlike other suppliers, which, it is true, may have contaminated supply chains themselves, Huawei is unique in being subject to article 14 of China’s national intelligence law, passed in June 2017, which empowers the intelligence agencies of the Chinese state to “request the relevant organs, organisations and civilians to provide necessary support, assistance and cooperation” to those intelligence services?”
“When 9/11 happened, it was widely pointed out that there was some sort of pact between the authorities in Saudi Arabia and the totalitarian Islamist revolutionaries that basically they could do what they liked abroad, as long as they kept their activities limited at home. That is what we might call a form of the devil’s bargain. Because I am not within the ring of secrecy, I am not in a position to know whether the Saudi intelligence services are really constantly feeding us vital information to thwart terrorist plots, or whether, as well as promoting and funding madrassahs all around the world that leach out this terrible form of totalitarian ideology, they are actually just giving us what I believe is known in the trade as chickenfeed, to keep us satisfied that it is better to remain, rather than cease to be, their friends.”
“Friend’s key point, I do not think the proximity or otherwise to 9/11 is the key determinant here; rather, it is whether Saudi Arabia acts as an important source of intelligence for this country in our shared combat against a global terrorism. It is a valuable partner in that particular battle and has helped to keep numerous UK citizens safe.” —[ Official Report , 20 June 2019; Vol. 662, c. 379.] This is where we begin to run up against a dilemma, because we all know that much of the problem of international Islamist totalitarian terrorism derives from sources in Saudi Arabia.”
“Friend to have conversations with the Foreign Secretary, perhaps with a view to publishing a digest of some of the representations that we make to the Saudis in trying to keep them from straying further away from acceptable standards of international behaviour?” We could add to that the dimensions of human rights abuse. The Secretary of State’s reply, rather predictably, was as follows: “The Foreign Secretary and I have answered numerous questions on this issue in the House of Commons, and we have certainly cited some of those incidents and been questioned on specific incidents in the House. On my right hon.”
“Members believe in the evolutionary, rather than the revolutionary, process. If we are going to make improvements, we have to take society with us from the point at which we find it. Let me give an example of the dilemmas that arise in relation to Saudi Arabia. On 20 June, I asked the Secretary of State for International Trade: “Do the Government accept that, as the years have rolled by since the 9/11 atrocities, it has become harder and harder to justify the closeness of our relationship with Saudi Arabia, but in defence of what the Government are trying to do, would it not be sensible for my right hon.”
“It is good to remind ourselves, therefore, that a few hundred years ago people in this country, who regarded themselves as Christians, thought nothing of inflicting terrible barbarities on one another, similar to what happened to poor Mr Khashoggi in that embassy, in the name of a belief as to which was the true branch of Christianity and which was what we would call, in another context, an infidel variation on that theme. If we think of that in the context of our history and say, “What could have been done several hundred years ago to rapidly bring those societies to an appreciation of human rights and democratic politics?”, we realise how difficult that process is. That is why revolutions often have such bloody consequences and make bad situations even worse. That is also why I would like to think that most hon.”
“I mentioned that I have been in this House for 22 years, which takes us back to 1997, when the Blair Government came in on a tide of optimism and idealism, and Robin Cook, who became Foreign Secretary, stated his admirable objective of importing an “ethical dimension” into foreign policy. The problem with trying to find an ethical dimension, however, is that the choices we face, far from being between good and evil, are often about which is the lesser of two evils. I am afraid that that is the situation in which we find ourselves regarding our decades-long involvement with the countries of the middle east. It is sometimes tempting to feel a sense of superiority about the way in which our society conducts itself, compared with the brutal and authoritarian regimes in other parts of the world in general, and in the middle east in particular.”