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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“If ever there were a prime candidate to be the subject of that excellent BBC Radio 4 series, “Moral Maze”, it would be Britain’s relationship with Saudi Arabia. I congratulate the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr Carmichael) on securing the debate and on the measured and temperate way in which he presented the case. All the Back-Bench Members who have spoken have shown wisdom and moderation in their remarks. I was particularly struck by the contribution of my hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Reigate (Crispin Blunt), who knows more about the Arab world than just about anybody I have come across in 22 years in this House. Even he, though, with all his knowledge of the subject, made no bones about the extent to which one must be conflicted about a relationship as complex as this.”
“I hope that they, in turn, will recognise that vast geopolitical forces are and will continue to be at work in the area, and that there are no morally perfect solutions to dealing with an environment like this, in which frankly all the actors are tainted. I have mentioned Sir Winston Churchill, but perhaps we should go back to the 19th-century concept of the balance of power, which expressed the interests of Britain by ensuring that no one power could become overwhelmingly dominant on the continent and that we did not get drawn in too closely with any power. My fear, which I have expressed before, is that in the conflicts in the middle east we are sometimes in danger of getting too closely involved with one side rather than the other. That side, I am afraid, is Saudi Arabia.”
“and gallant Friend the Member for Reigate said in passing, whether it was better to wash our hands of supplying military hardware to Saudi Arabia if the consequence would be to anchor that country in the orbit of Russia or China, as the Iranian regime already is. I conclude by commending the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland for securing the debate, and by endorsing his notion that pressure on the Saudi regime on the human rights front is one area in which we can safely express our differences without risking a rupture that we cannot afford on overall strategic grounds. I wish him well in his campaign and congratulate all those who stand up for human rights in Saudi Arabia.”
“His famous reply was: “If Hitler invaded Hell, I would make at least a favourable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.” The history of diplomacy is that we often have to have relationships with unsavoury regimes in order to avoid something that would be even worse. However, having to have a relationship with a regime that does terrible things does not mean that we should go silent on criticising it. That is why I particularly welcome this debate. In some senses, it was a relief to discover that it would be more about human rights than about the arms trade. Believe me, if we had to have the same debate about the arms trade, which has been touched on slightly, we would face an infinitely more difficult dilemma. We would have to decide, as my hon.”
“That welcome intervention, if accurate—I have no reason to believe that it is not—is a powerful argument in favour of continued engagement with the regime, even though from time to time it does things that we would regard, with justification, as barbaric. That has often been the nature of international relations, and those are often the difficult choices that have to be made. To give the most extreme example, Sir Winston Churchill had a lifelong hatred of bolshevism and communism; he said at the time of the 1917 revolution that he wanted bolshevism to be strangled at birth. When he found himself in alliance with Stalin after the Nazi invasion of Russia in 1941, he was twitted by a political opponent who pointed out his lifelong hatred of communism.”
“Were I to become Prime Minister, I would consider the path of further increases in spending once the 2.5 per cent had been achieved.” That is their position.”
“I can give you an absolute commitment to fund defence fully. I believe Military spending should be dictated by the threats we face—and, it is clear that these threats have multiplied in both scale and complexity in recent years. I guarantee, of course, that we will exceed the minimum 2% NATO spending target and the Defence Budget will continue to grow at a minimum of 0.5% annually.” On 8 July, the current Foreign Secretary replied: “In this leadership campaign, I have given more attention to defence spending than any other candidate. I have pledged to increase the defence budget to 2.5 per cent of GDP over five years. I have argued that additional funds would need to be”— made available, I think he means— “for new capabilities and not simply plugging gaps in existing plans.”
“In the four minutes available, I propose to make two points. First, I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Anne-Marie Trevelyan) on a masterly introduction to the debate. Her timing could have been better—to secure a debate so close to the arrival of a new Prime Minister is perhaps chancing her arm. Nevertheless, if we are to get the issue in the news, we need to link it to that, so I will quote the responses of the two remaining candidates in the race to be the next Prime Minister to my letter of 26 June, which asked about their defence policies. On 2 July, my right hon. Friend the Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Boris Johnson), the former Foreign Secretary, replied: “The armed forces have done some exceptional work of late in attempting to live within an increasingly stretched budgetary environment.”
“If we exclude them, the new report shows that our like-for-like defence spending is only 1.8%. Is that credible in an age when the profile of the threats we face includes an adversarial Russia and the revival of a terrorist threat in the form of Islamist terrorism? When we compare it with the 1980s, when we regularly spent 4.5% compared with 1.8%, or 5% compared with 2.1%, we can see the shortfall.”
“I had better not, because of time pressure. Secondly, to coincide with the debate, the Defence Committee has updated its April 2016 report, “Shifting the Goalposts? Defence Expenditure and the 2% pledge”, in which we set defence spending in context. We showed that, while we spent similar amounts on education, defence and health in the mid-1980s, we now spend 2.5 times more on education than defence, and 4 times more on health. Our latest report, which was published today—HC 2527, for those who are interested—has recalculated the figures for the last few years and brought them up to date. It shows that, in the last three years, we have spent 2.1% on defence, if we calculate it from NATO’s point of view and bring in extra things such as war pensions, which never used to count towards the total.”
“What more can the Government do to publicise those important examples of where communities and community organisations have succeeded in the supply of information that has prevented terrorist plots, saved innocent lives and helped to take people who were at risk of radicalisation away from extremist doctrines?”
“To coincide with next Tuesday’s debate, the Committee will bring out an updated report, following on from our 2016 report in which we laid out the decline in defence expenditure as a proportion of GDP compared with rises in health, education and, above all, pensions and benefits, and how defence had declined in our scale of national priorities to such an extent that the size of the armed forces was becoming unsustainable. The national shipbuilding strategy gives us an opportunity to reverse that decline, and I would be grateful to hear from the Minister what plans there are to do that. It will be no easy task, given that we will remove the Type 23 frigates from the fleet at the rate of one a year between 2023 and 2035. It will be no small task to replace each of those frigates at that sort of rate with a new, modern, complex warship.”
“Slightly less than a week away on Tuesday 16 July there will be another debate in this Chamber about defence expenditure. Of course, all these issues, including the important one about the fleet solid support ships raised by the right hon. Gentleman, generally come back to defence expenditure and—it must be said—the inadequacy of defence expenditure. I regard it as one of the achievements of the Select Committee on Defence that, with members representing no fewer than four different parties, it has consistently come to the view, irrespective of party allegiance, that too little is spent on defence in the United Kingdom—far too little. Our expectations were managed downwards to such an extent that it was believed to be some sort of triumph when we did not dip below NATO’s basic recommended minimum guideline of 2% of GDP.”
“In other words, we get the ship hulls built and get them out to sea, and then, over time, because we have built compartments in the vessels that can be used for a variety of purposes over a period of years, we sow the seeds of their future adaptability and additional potency. We should remember that this was the first time there was talk of an increase in the total number of vessels. Instead of just being told, “We will be replacing 13 Type 23 frigates on a like-for-like basis,” we were told that there would definitely be eight of the Type 26, specialising in anti-submarine warfare, and at least five—not a limit of five—of the Type 31e general purpose vessels. It will be interesting to hear from the Minister whether there are plans to exceed the figure of five for the Type 31e.”
“However powerful, versatile and potent they are, each can be in only one place at any one time, and that means that each can be built in only one place over a particular period. That makes it harder to have a versatile and flexible strategy to match those qualities in the ships that are being built. One of the encouraging results of the publication of the national shipbuilding strategy was that, in identifying the general purpose frigate, the Type 31e—the cheap and cheerful version of the next generation of frigates—as one that should be designed for export, Sir John Parker, to whom we should again pay tribute for everything he did, also specified that, as a result of those vessels being built in modular fashion, they would be very flexible and adaptable over time to what is sometimes called incremental acquisition.”
“When that little stratagem succeeded, the 31 were reduced to 25, and the 25 were then reduced to our present pathetic total of 19 destroyers and frigates—six destroyers and 13 frigates, to be precise. Before anybody starts lecturing us about the change in the nature of warfare, it is worth reflecting on the fact that one of those 13 frigates, HMS Montrose, is in the news today, having performed the very important function of protecting British shipping from Iranian attempts to respond to the impounding of a large vessel of theirs that was believed to be carrying contraband oil to Syria. It is rather hard to have a strategy when we are dealing with only a relatively limited number of vessels, even though those vessels may well be much more potent, powerful and versatile than their predecessors.”
“It set out a policy for the Royal Navy that seemed to leave it in quite a winning position. Although the Royal Navy was asked to sacrifice three of its frigates or destroyers, thus reducing its total from 35 to 32, the review put forward the concept of carrier strike and amphibious strike, which meant that the two large aircraft carriers would be built. Had it remained in that formulation, the Royal Navy would have had every reason to be satisfied. We all know, however, that that was not the case. Successive Governments reduced the total from 32 frigates and destroyers, first to 31, on the basis that these were much more capable ships and therefore 31 would be able to do the work of 32.”
“As an old schoolmate of yours, Mr Evans, it is a particular pleasure for me to contribute to this debate under your able chairmanship. I pay tribute to the right hon. Member for North Durham (Mr Jones) for continuing his relentless and entirely justified campaign to ensure that the defence footprint, particularly as regards naval shipbuilding, is not shrunk still further in this country. Mr Evans, you will know, having been in the House even longer than me, that one of the few benefits of having spent more than two decades here is that we get to see trends over decades. What has happened with our naval shipbuilding does not make for a pretty picture. I remember the 1998 strategic defence review undertaken by the then new Labour Government of Tony Blair.”
“The trouble that the Ministry of Defence runs into is that every time a long-term strategic view suggests to it that we ought to make an investment of this sort, it runs up against the short-term imperative that the defence budget is so small that cuts must be made at every opportunity, even where, as in this case, they are short-sighted and storing up problems for the future.”
“That is true, because if we fall below what one might call critical mass, we will not be able to maintain the necessary footprint to support the construction and manning of vessels on a consistent basis. That is why the question of the fleet solid support ships is so important. Those vessels can be classified as warships or, if we choose not to, simply as auxiliaries. We have that choice, and it is a choice that we feel, on a cross-party basis, it is necessary to exercise.”
“This will be our chance to say that the great naval traditions, all those matters of history and all the events in which his great hero, Sir Winston Churchill, participated as First Lord of the Admiralty and later as Prime Minister will be laying, as another Prime Minister once said, the hand of history on his shoulder. What better way to shake the hand of history than to restore defence spending to its rightful place in the scale of our national priorities?”
“We just scraped over the 2% line by doing that. I will not spoil the effect by revealing in advance what the new figures show, but believe me, they are not cause for great comfort. We are now at a stage when we are expecting a change of Prime Minister. Every Prime Minister has a honeymoon period. Even the present one did—sadly, it did not last all that long. In this case, the person most likely to become the next Prime Minister projects an optimism, a sunny personality and a robust world view. I suggest that all of us, from whichever party we are, should remain united on one thought—there will be a brief window of opportunity. There will be a moment when we will have a new occupant of No. 10 Downing Street who will be full of the joys of spring.”
“Although we live in a world where we face new hybrid warfare, cyber-warfare and other highly technological threats we have not faced before, that does not mean that the traditional threats on the sea, under the sea, in the air and on land have gone away. It is a profound mistake to say that, just because we need to spend more money to meet novel threats, we can afford to spend less money to keep up the strength of our conventional armed forces. I referred briefly to the Defence Committee’s original report from April 2016, entitled “Shifting the Goalposts?” that set out charts showing the decline in defence expenditure to barely 2%—and that figure was achieved only by including certain categories in the total, such as war pensions, that NATO guidelines allow us to include but we never previously chose to.”
“I even heard Sir Mark Sedwill in front of a Committee on which I sat refer to a £56 billion defence and security budget, thus taking all the budgets and putting them together, as it were, in a single basket. There was only one snag with that. If the review decided, as it was minded to do, that much more money needed to be spent on what was called “21st century threats” such as cyber-warfare and ambiguous or hybrid warfare, as there was to be no extra money for anything, the already depleted conventional armed forces would have to be cut further. The hon. Gentleman’s point is therefore particularly pertinent.”
“I entirely endorse what the hon. Gentleman said, and I am glad that he mentioned the modernising defence programme. I will take a moment to talk about that exercise. It was felt at the time that the programme was not a very substantial document, but it did rescue the armed forces from what I can only describe as a bureaucratic ambush laid out for it by something called the national security capability review. Right hon. and hon. Members will remember that that mini-strategic defence review was an exercise that I believe began in 2017 and was conducted not by the Ministry of Defence but by the National Security Adviser, who is currently also the Cabinet Secretary. It was designed to consider security, intelligence, cyber-warfare and defence all in the round.”
“What the Minister says is completely correct. The question is not so much whether countries choose to do this but whether they have to. In the case of Germany, its expenditure on defence is notoriously a much smaller proportion of its GDP than ours is of ours, so it is probably doing it for the same sort of reasons. That does not make it the right policy.”
“I fully understand the logic of the Minister’s position, but it just goes to what I was trying to convey in my speech: it is a question of short-term savings that will show up in an annual budget, compared with medium to long-term costs when the time comes that we want to build other ships and we find that we have lost our industrial footprint to some extent and have to reconstruct it. I acknowledge that that is the dilemma that he faces.”
“The Minister is being amazingly kind. I really appreciate it. Let me put this sunny scenario before him. Let us imagine that the wishes of the Defence Committee come true and the defence budget is restored to 3% of GDP, as it was right up until the middle of the 1990s, quite a few years after the end of the cold war. Will he at least acknowledge that if there were an uplift in the defence budget, spending some of that extra money on securing the shipyards and the defence-industrial footprint, even if that sometimes meant that we spent more than we might spend in the short term if we contracted with an overseas builder, would be a sensible strategic decision?”
“I congratulate my hon. Friend on bringing this debate forward. Will he also pay tribute to the people who did so much in the predecessor organisation GCHQ during the second world war, and lived out their lives afterwards in complete secrecy, claiming no credit for their great achievements? I can remember the year 1974—two years before he was born—when the book “The Ultra Secret” revealed what had happened, by which time it was far too late for many of the people who had done those deeds to claim the credit they deserved.”
“Friend, as I choose to describe him, the Member for Belfast East (Gavin Robinson), who is an authority on these matters, intervened to make the point strongly that what the Defence Committee has in mind—namely, a qualified statute of limitations—is not an amnesty in any way, shape or form.”
“It suggests that there should be “a report on progress made towards protecting veterans of the Armed Forces and other security personnel from repeated investigation for Troubles-related incidents by introducing a presumption of non-prosecution, in the absence of compelling new evidence, whether in the form of a Qualified Statute of Limitations or by some other legal mechanism.” It is very important to note that the word “amnesty” does not feature in the amendment. I was particularly pleased when, in another debate on this subject on 20 May this year, my hon.”
“I rise to speak in support of amendment 6, which stands in my name and the names of my right hon. Friend the Member for Sevenoaks (Sir Michael Fallon), my hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth, Moor View (Johnny Mercer) and 16 other Members. It relates to a topic that, by sheer coincidence, I was addressing the Chamber about on 9 July exactly 12 months ago to this day. That topic is the need for protection for our service personnel against repeated reinvestigation of alleged offences committed during the troubles, even though those have in many cases been previously investigated and there is little or no prospect of significant new evidence being forthcoming. The amendment speaks for itself.”
“What that Act provides for is that if somebody has been convicted of not just one grave offence but even multiple murders, they might well be given a life sentence, but under that legislation no one will ever serve more than two years of that life sentence in jail. That has sometimes been thought to be something that applied to paramilitaries and terrorists but not to the armed forces, but in repeated debates on this subject it has been established very clearly and unambiguously in ministerial statements from the Front Bench that it applies to everyone. That does not create moral equivalence between the people it applies to; it simply creates the same equivalence before the law that applies to every British citizen, whether virtuous or villainous.”
“I am afraid that we have got into a situation where people in Northern Ireland have become, to some extent, a prisoner of their own rhetoric. As I understand it, there is opposition to what people imagine is being proposed on the basis that it draws some form of moral equivalence between the forces of law and order and those people who went out, illegally armed, to commit terrorist offences. It does nothing of the sort. The only equivalence that anyone can or should read into such measures is the basic equivalence before the law that applies to everyone. I have made this point before, and I am afraid that I am going to keep making it until one day more people accept it: already, in the form of the Northern Ireland (Sentences) Act 1998, such equivalence is quite clear.”
“I am so grateful to the hon. Lady, and delighted that I gave way to her, because she has put that far better than I could. What we are trying to come to here is a reasonable conclusion that would mean that, should compelling new evidence emerge—something that was overlooked and has now come to the fore, and that puts a completely different complexion on an allegation of a serious crime—indeed that would still be pursued, but where matters had been looked at previously, and where there was no compelling new evidence, a line should be drawn. There is one more element that comes into this, which is the question whether such a qualified statute of limitations would conform to international law.”
“I thank my hon. Friend, who is an expert in these matters, for that perceptive observation. Certainly, on the differentiation between people who were lawfully armed, trying to preserve the peace and the good order of society, and those who went out unlawfully to try to disrupt that, I believe that my right hon. Friend the Member for Sevenoaks will address that very point in some depth, because it goes to the heart of his amendment.”
“What might loosely be termed the Nelson Mandela solution means that we would satisfy the requirement for an investigation but remove the sword of Damocles hanging over someone’s head, because they would know that they would be required to say what they remembered of the events concerned, with an absolute assurance that no prosecutions would result. That would give the bereaved families the best chance of finding out the truth.”
“I am not an expert on the subject, but I think that the numbers at the moment are very low, but the threat—the sword of Damocles—is hanging over a very large number of people. That leads me rather neatly to the final point that I want to make, about conformity with international law, which does not require a prosecution but does require an investigation. That is why the Select Committee on Defence—we have a further report coming out that relates not just to Northern Ireland, but to the wider context of other campaigns—has always sought to combine the notion of a qualified statute of limitations with that of a truth recovery process.”
“I thought that by implication I had covered that point. The likelihood is that anyone before the law would be able to lay claim to the statute, but the reality is that what my hon. Friend calls the other side—with their letters of comfort, among other things—are the last people who need to be worried about the present situation. We must not get hung up on the terminology. The people we have to protect are those where the records exist, but to whom letters of comfort have not been given—our armed forces veterans. In conclusion, I want to—”
“He said that a solution “must allow not only the victims and the veterans, but the whole society in Northern Ireland, to draw a line.” He said: “There is not an exact comparison between Northern Ireland, which is a unique place, and South Africa, but there are many parallels. We must find some way of creating an approach that will allow people to get closure, truth and justice.” —[ Official Report , 20 May 2019; Vol. 660, c. 248-250.] That is what my amendment seeks to do, and I look forward to the Minister’s response.”
“That confirms the very point that I was making, and it is why the main purpose of the amendment, although arguably it might be cited by people who are unlikely to be prosecuted, is to protect our service personnel, security forces and so on. I would like to end—I really will end—by saying that I was encouraged in a debate in Westminster Hall on 20 May this year by the response of the Minister of State to points of the sort that I have made today. He said that I had “mentioned the Nelson Mandela approach; I will come back to that point, because it is central to any potential action and solution”.”
“I am not a lawyer, but my understanding is that the ICC, having been set up long after the troubles, does not have retrospective application, even if the hon. Gentleman’s interpretation of the law is correct.”
“Thank you, Mr Speaker. I am pleased that the Secretary of State mentioned HMS Albion in an earlier answer. Does she recall that it is not that many months since her predecessor had to fend off moves to scrap HMS Albion and HMS Bulwark and to reduce the size of the Army by 11,000, the Royal Marines by 2,000 and the RAF by 1,250? Does she accept that there is a fight to be had with the real enemy here, and that is the Treasury?”
“Although Mr Farage has ruled himself out, the question still arises of what the effect would be if Sir Kim felt that his position had become untenable and, instead of retiring in a few months’ time as planned, he had to go earlier. One effect would surely be that an outgoing Prime Minister had a say in the replacement, rather than the new Prime Minister. Would it not be sensible for Sir Kim to be encouraged to stay in post, so that there is no temptation for an outgoing Prime Minister to appoint to a plum job one of her inner circle?”
“My question is along similar lines. Let me just probe a little further. I once asked the Prime Minister this question nine times in a seven-minute session without getting a satisfactory answer. If there were to be this dreaded hard border, who would actually construct it? The British would not construct it, and the Irish Republic would not construct it. The shadow Secretary of State says that the EU would insist on it, so would the EU construct it? If so, how would it do so?”
“My hon. Friend is tremendously courteous. May I congratulate him on doing what the Prime Minister and the shadow Secretary of State did not do? He seems to have got very close to giving a straight answer to the question. The straight answer appears to be that, if the European Union decided that a hard, impermeable, fenced border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic needed to be built, the Irish Republic would accept its orders from Brussels and construct it. That seems to be the answer, does it not?”
“Is not a large percentage of the country occupied by the forces of Assad? Does he now accept what the Government have denied all along: that if we wanted the insurgency in Syria to be defeated, the logical consequence—unacceptable though it seems—was going to be that Assad was at least in part going to win, given the support of his Russian backers?”
“It is always a pleasure to hear my right hon. Friend talking about this subject; although it is a grim subject, the depth of his knowledge is always enlightening, and I would hope that at some stage we might have a debate rather than just an update statement so that we can engage with him more fully. May I therefore raise a couple of points? First, does my right hon. Friend accept that ultimately the reason Daesh was defeated was that, by seizing and holding territory, it gave up the terrorists’ best weapon: the cloak of invisibility? Secondly, the only thing I found missing from his statement was any reference to that part of Syria that was not fought upon and occupied by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces. Can he explain what percentage of the country is occupied by forces other than the Kurdish-led forces?”
“I have not put in to speak because the issue that concerns me is still pending, but does my hon. Friend accept that even being a senior consultant is no protection against what can happen to someone who blows the whistle? I have a case of a senior consultant in an eye unit who became concerned about financial irregularity and, even worse, substandard treatment that was causing eyesight to be lost. The effect of his complaining was that he was the one who was suspended and who faced a General Medical Council examination. The Royal College of Ophthalmologists was simply shown the results of an internal inquiry, not the source material. The Care Quality Commission did nothing, and the GMC is only now beginning to look into his claims—now that it has dismissed the false allegations that were made against him. Is that not a disgrace?”
“At the beginning of my hon. Friend’s speech he referred to the terrible pact between Hitler and Stalin that paved the way for the second world war. I think he also ought to make some reference to the fact that when the underground army rose up in 1944, and we wished to supply them with air drops and munitions, the Russians refused to allow our transport aircraft to operate from their bases to help support the Poles in that uprising. I know that my hon. Friend is mainly concerned with the Polish contribution to the effort in Britain, but we should not forget those people in Poland who saved the remnants of families such as mine from extermination by hiding Jewish people at the risk of their own lives.”