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%.”
The complete record
Every one of 3,750 lines we hold for Sir Julian Lewis, in date order, each linked to its source. Free to read, in full, without an account. Page 42 of 75.
“I am grateful to my friend the hon. Member for Birmingham, Perry Barr (Mr Mahmood) for giving way. May I add one more name to that list? General Sosabowski was in command of the 1st Independent Parachute Brigade, which fought so gallantly at Arnhem. We keep remembering the contribution of Poles to British victories. That was not a British victory, but no one contributed to it more gallantly than the Poles, the parachutists and those who came in the gliders, in that fateful battle at the Arnhem bridge.”
“Does my right hon. Friend accept that it is not unknown for Communist regimes to insert agents provocateurs into popular movements in order to discredit them? Will he bear in mind that the messages that we send to Communist China—for example, in sucking up to it over issues such as Huawei and our telecommunications infrastructure—need to be looked at through the prism of its human rights abuses?”
“The Opposition spokesman mentioned an estimate of 55,000 children addicted to gambling. Do the Government accept that this terrifically large figure is accurate? If so, what proportion of it is a result of the advent of online gambling and what age verification measures are in place to supply at least part of the solution?”
“I am a little more familiar with the cycle involving warships than I am with aircraft, but we can see the same pattern. For example, there are two types of submarines: nuclear-powered attack submarines and ballistic missile submarines. No sooner have we completed the construction of a class of one of those vessels than we have to construct a class of the other.”
“The complexity of weapons systems in any of the dimensions that we might care to identify—land, sea, air, cyber-space, or space itself—is increasing. If we do not have an adequate financial base for defence, it is difficult to see how any of those projects can hope to be brought to fruition. That applies as much to what from this moment onwards I will call “the Tempest strategy” as it does to every other system. In a few moments, I will come back to the terms of the letter that I sent. However. I want to emphasise what my hon. Friend the Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Anne-Marie Trevelyan) has just said by noting that as these advanced weapons systems get more complex, their numbers get fewer, and they have to be planned longer and longer in advance. Needless to say, they also cost a great deal more.”
“I have in front of me the text of the similar letters sent to each, picking up on the Foreign Secretary’s bid for the support of defence-minded MPs. In those letters, we spell out the fact that the Defence Committee, whose members represent four different parties, has for several years been absolutely united about the fact that we need to be spending more on defence. In particular, the Committee believes that we ought to have as our target figure not the bare 2% of GDP that we currently just about manage to spend, but a figure approaching 3% of GDP, the proportion of gross domestic product that used to be spent by the United Kingdom—not during the cold war, when that figure was 4.5% to 5%, but as late as the mid-1990s, several years after the cold war had come to an end.”
“It is a pleasure to make a brief contribution to this debate under your chairmanship, Mr Stringer. All three previous speakers have shown absolute mastery of the detail, which I cannot hope to match in this context, so I intend to draw out some of the broader issues and seize a particular current opportunity: the forthcoming election of a new leader of the Conservative party and Prime Minister. Occasionally in politics, a window of opportunity opens, usually when aspiring leaders of the nation wish to generate support from those whom they presume to lead. We on the Select Committee on Defence met on Tuesday and decided that we would write to both of the final candidates in the leadership election.”
“Personally, I feel that would be a disastrous mistake—it would mean that we would no longer be able to rely on retaining an industrial base that could produce and develop weapons systems of a complexity to keep us at the cutting edge of air power, sea power and land power, let alone protect ourselves in space and cyber-space.”
“It is a matter of concern that there have been indications that the permanent part of defence and security machinery has been advocating that we move away from our traditional profile and stance: of investing in such systems as those aircraft to a greater degree than the rest of our NATO European allies. Normally, as we know, the overall burden of NATO’s expenditure has been borne by the US superpower; the continental allies have put forth something below the minimum guideline and we have been somewhere in between. It has been disturbing to see arguments being put behind the scenes that we should come to terms with the fact that we should not in future seek to outdo our continental European allies and should lower our expenditure to the level they invest.”
“Looking at the Tempest strategy, we have to ask ourselves how an aircraft of that degree of complexity, requiring so long to be designed and brought into service and demanding so much in the way of our resources, will be financed. The sole issue that I wish colleagues to consider today is that, if it takes 30 years to conceive and build the sixth generation of our air power, we will have to invest a great deal of money in it. We on the Defence Committee have worked across party lines to try to change the terms of the debate on funding aircraft, land systems and naval systems, as well as dealing with the issues that arise from what are commonly called the 21st-century threats in space and cyber-space.”
“The question that arises, therefore, is how the new generation of aircraft can be financed. With that, we come back to the issue of what we are being promised. Whenever Prime Ministers or Defence Secretaries are in place, we are told constantly that all is fine and everything in the garden is rosy and flourishing, yet when Defence Secretaries leave their position, they immediately call for increases. Recently, one brave Defence Minister even said at the Dispatch Box that we are not spending enough on defence. Now, we find that the Foreign Secretary is saying that within the next five years we ought to increase defence spending by a quarter, and he even made a speech at Mansion House suggesting that over 10 years, the rate of increase should be that much greater.”
“All will become clear very soon, Mr Stringer; you have my assurance. Just as we must not interrupt that cycle, whether it be for a nuclear-powered submarine that is an attack submarine or a nuclear-armed submarine that is a ballistic missile submarine, we must not interrupt it for frigate or destroyer construction. We face exactly the same problem with aircraft strategies: we have gone from the Typhoon to the F-35, and even as we are introducing the F-35—the fifth-generation aircraft—we must already be planning for the sixth. That is despite the fact that, as has been pointed out, one of the existing aircraft still has at least 20 years to go in its lifespan, and the other has only just begun a period in service with the Royal Air Force lasting probably twice that.”
“We cannot anticipate that, so equally we cannot anticipate whether our allies who might be available in one type of conflict will be available in another and, even if they are available in that other context, whether they will remain available until the fight is brought to a close. As we get involved in more complex and expensive systems—systems that take longer to design, develop and produce—we also must recognise the limitations on our scenario prediction ability. That is why we must invest enough and recognise that a full spectrum of military capability is essential, including, of course, in relation to the Tempest aircraft strategy.”
“If we are relying for the sake of our air power, for example, on a particular injection of expertise and capital from a particular ally who is no longer available, our defence capability could be fatally undermined. I will conclude with this point. We are trying, as always, to construct a system for the air, as in the other dimensions, that is the most advanced the world has ever seen. That means that we have to be prepared not only to pay for it, but to recognise that we cannot expect to anticipate the context and circumstances under which the crisis will arise where the system will be put into action.”
“That is a critical point, because the argument to which I have obliquely referred—I was tempted to refer to it more explicitly, but I decided not to, bearing in mind your stricture, Mr Stringer—and which is being put forward by civil service mandarins is not only that we should spend less, but that we should recognise the fact that we will only ever be involved in major conflicts along with allies and so we do not need the full spectrum of capability on land, at sea or in the air. The problem with that approach is that it assumes that if we were to go into a conflict alongside allies at the beginning, those allies will remain available throughout—right until the end. What happens, however, if one of those allies is overrun and occupied, as has frequently happened in major conflicts in the past?”
“As we approach the 10th anniversary of the Anglo-French Lancaster House agreements, does the Prime Minister agree that the warmth and closeness of the military relationship between France and the United Kingdom is exemplified by the six-monthly meetings held between the Defence Committees of both Houses in both countries and by the joint inquiries carried out by the Defence Committees of this House and of the National Assembly, which signify a closeness that is as great as it has been at any time in the post-war period?”
“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. 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?”
“Bearing the sub judice rule firmly in mind, what does the Prime Minister think of the principle of bringing a dying, decorated former soldier before the courts of Northern Ireland on charges based on no new evidence that are unlikely ever to lead to a conviction?”
“I think I would have wanted more to discover what had really happened. That is the strength of the Nelson Mandela approach, which was to understand that at a certain point we can heal society only by drawing a line, and find out the truth only by removing the threat of prosecution. When someone knows that as a result of prosecution the maximum sentence that can be imposed is so risibly disproportionate and lenient compared with the crime of which they would have been found guilty, it is easier than ever to understand that that is the civilised and sensible way forward.”
“Under that Act, even if someone killed 50 people they cannot go to jail for more than a maximum of two years. I speak with some understanding of the position of families who lost a loved one under such unexplained and unresolved circumstances, because my family were caught up in the holocaust of the second world war. I must say that I was not terribly keen on statutes of limitations for Nazi guards from Auschwitz, for example, but if somebody had said to me then, “There is no question of anybody serving a sentence that is in any way proportionate to murdering somebody, and in any way a recompense for doing that,” would I have felt that it was perhaps more important to bring out the truth than to try to send someone who did not want to tell the truth to jail for a derisory two years?”
“Understandably, we have the problem that people on the paramilitary side of the argument do not want any of their personnel to be pursued for anything that they did, but they are adamant that the servants of the British state must be prosecuted until the end of time. People who rightly point out that the servants of the British state had very different intentions from the terrorists naturally take the view that they do not want any equality, as we have heard expressed forcefully in this debate, between service personnel doing their duty and terrorists trying to destroy innocent people. However, in one respect I slightly disagree. This is just my personal view, but I believe that one must focus on a piece of legislation that has not yet been mentioned: the Northern Ireland (Sentences) Act 1998.”
“In that respect, I pay tribute to both the previous Defence Secretary, my right hon. Friend the Member for South Staffordshire (Gavin Williamson), and the Defence Secretary before him, my right hon. Friend the Member for Sevenoaks (Sir Michael Fallon), both of whom took this issue very seriously. Under the previous Defence Secretary, a special unit was set up in the Ministry of Defence, as the Committee had long advocated privately, to try, as my hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Beckenham said, to get a grip on this matter once and for all. As a Committee, we met informally with that unit. Progress is undoubtedly being made.”
“The reason why we immediately started another inquiry was that, when we saw that the consultation had come out without our recommendation even being included for consideration, we thought, “Right—if that’s the way the Government are going to play it, we’ll start the whole process all over again.” That is what we are doing, and we are at an advanced stage in our re-examination, although this time we are examining the wider picture of service personnel at risk of prosecution as a result of other conflicts in foreign countries. I do not wish to understate the importance of the progress that the Government appear to have made in moving towards a solution to that problem at least. I welcome that, and I hope that they do not get cold feet about what they are proposing to do. It is good that the Government have worked together.”
“I suspect—I put it no more strongly than that—that with a new Secretary of State, the people behind the scenes in the Northern Ireland Office felt, perhaps, that they had a better opportunity to kill a proposal that they may feel would somehow endanger what has been constructed to stop the terrorist violence of the past. I am unconvinced that that is an honourable approach for the Government to have taken. I make just one other point; so many people wish to speak that I do not wish to labour things too much longer.”
“The only explanation I can find for that is that somebody behind the scenes lobbied someone in a position to make the decision for the option of a statute of limitations to be excluded. I know only what I saw in a newspaper report, which I think came out very recently, suggesting that there was some correspondence between the Prime Minister and other Cabinet Ministers. What I have no doubt about is that, when our original report came out, the then Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, my right hon. Friend the Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup (James Brokenshire), subscribed to the answer that we received in the response. Subsequently, sadly, for medical reasons he temporarily had to leave the Cabinet and there was a change of personnel.”
“The consultation will invite respondents to give their views on ‘the potential effectiveness and appropriateness of alternative approaches such as amnesties and a statute of limitations”— I am glad that the Government did not identify the two as being the same because, as the hon. Member for Belfast East (Gavin Robinson) made clear, they are not— “to address the legacy of Northern Ireland’s past’. Following the consultation’s conclusion, the Government will consider all views carefully to inform next steps.” I need hardly remind anybody present that that did not happen. When the consultation appeared, there was no reference to the suggestion of a statute of limitations.”
“The Government’s reply was as follows: “While the Government believes that the most effective option to address Northern Ireland’s past is to implement the proposals set out in the Stormont House Agreement, the Government acknowledges that others have different views on the best way forward, including approaches such as that proposed by the Committee which do not involve recourse to the criminal justice system. As such, the Government intends to include within its forthcoming consultation on the draft Northern Ireland (Stormont House Agreement) Bill a section entitled ‘Alternative approaches to addressing the past’. This section of the consultation will discuss alternative ways forward and include a description of the Committee’s recommendation.”
“Their comment underneath that conclusion was: “The Government notes the Committee’s comment.” More interesting and positive, however, was the Government’s response to the recommendation that I am about to quote from our original report: “Accordingly, we recommend the adoption of”— what we called— “Option One—the enactment of a statute of limitations, covering all Troubles-related incidents, up to the signing of the 1998 Belfast Agreement, which involved former members of the Armed Forces. This should be coupled with the continuation and development of a truth recovery mechanism which would provide the best possible prospect of bereaved families finding out the facts, once no-one needed to fear being prosecuted.” In other words, we recommended adopting what might loosely be called “the Nelson Mandela model” from South Africa.”
“The conclusion was: “It is clear from the experience of these legacy investigations that, unless a decision is taken to draw a line under all Troubles-related cases, without exception, they will continue to grind on for many years to come—up to half-a-century after the incidents concerned.” We had to wait a long time for the Government’s reply, which eventually came in November 2017—later than the two months that one normally expects.”
“Why are we having to do a second report and a second inquiry into what amounts to largely the same material? It is because of something rather strange that happened when we produced our first report. Our first report was produced in April 2017; it was the seventh report of the 2016-17 Session and it was entitled “Investigations into fatalities in Northern Ireland involving British military personnel”. I will read one of its conclusions and one of its recommendations.”
“I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Southport (Damien Moore) for his initiative in bringing this debate to the House and for how he presented the case. I also pay tribute to all the subsequent speakers who, without exception, made powerful and well-informed contributions. I wish briefly to answer, perhaps in part, the question posed by my hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Beckenham (Bob Stewart) in his extremely powerful contribution. He asked, “What are you doing about it?” I can perhaps throw a little light on one aspect: what the Defence Committee has been doing about it. As has been mentioned several times already, we have produced one inquiry report and had a response to it from the Government, and now we are working on another one.”
“I would not put it quite as explicitly as that, but it was certainly implicit in the way that our report recommendation was first put forward and then somehow mysteriously excised from the Government’s agenda. May I try to resolve the pointed issue and ask my hon. Friend whether he would accept the term, “qualified statute of limitations”? That is what the Government seem to be putting forward, that there will be a presumption against prosecution after 10 years have elapsed—hence the statute of limitations—unless new and compelling evidence emerges, hence the qualification.”
“Does the hon. Lady accept that the great advantage of the truth recovery mechanism is that by removing the threat of prosecution, the truth is more likely to come out, so families will find resolution?”
“I welcome the fact that the Government seem to be moving towards some sort of qualified statute of limitations approach, but may I urge them to bring their announcement to the Floor of the House, rather than simply putting it out as a written statement, as at the moment they are suggesting they intend to do?”
“On behalf of the Defence Committee, may I welcome the Secretary of State to her new position, for which she is well qualified indeed? May I also pay tribute to her predecessor, who not only saved our amphibious forces from premature dissolution, but won considerable battles with one of our real adversaries in defence: the Treasury? Does the Minister, as a veteran himself, agree that part of the veterans strategy ought to be the protection of former service personnel against repeated re-investigation for their activities in past conflicts?”
“As a naval reservist herself, will the Secretary of State personally look into the removal of the captain of HMS Queen Elizabeth, apparently on the grounds of what might have been a misunderstanding about the use of a car supplied by the Ministry of Defence? If we lose talented people like this, surely it is not only unjust but a waste of all the investment made in someone’s 29-year unblemished career in the Royal Navy.”
“If anyone ever tries to tempt the Secretary of State with the maxim that the end justifies the means, will she bear in mind the wise words of Sir Robert Thompson? He was probably the leading counter-insurgency expert of the 1960s and wrote about torture and other extrajudicial means: “Not only is this morally wrong, but, over a period, it will create more practical difficulties for a government than it solves. A government which does not act in accordance with the law forfeits the right to be called a government and cannot then expect its people to obey the law.””
“I wonder what the Leader of the House can do about this matter because one of her predecessors, Sir George Young, proved very effective in tackling it with Westminster City Council.”
“Thank you, Mr Speaker. I was not expecting to be called until the end, because I would like to raise with the Leader of the House the situation at Carriage Gates, which is not strictly a matter of the business of the House. I am concerned that the incessant loud noise, which is being made not in the context of specific demonstrations but at varying times, is taking us back to a situation prior to 2010. Not only does it cause distraction, particularly in Westminster Hall, but, much more importantly, it has a huge effect on the police who are guarding the gates and have to be on the alert, as we know only too well, against attack. There are byelaws about this. I do not care which side of the EU argument the shouters are on—probably both sides—but it needs to be stopped.”
“Will the Secretary of State explain how this welcome scheme will work in a couple of respects? Is the list of 433 vulnerable buildings going to be published? How will those who might be living in a building where no work has been done be able to access the scheme, and will any of the money be recoverable from the freeholders who refuse to do the work of their own volition?”
“May I add one more category to those listed by my right hon. Friend and the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant)? I am talking about service personnel who were blown up in Iraq and Afghanistan, some of whom, although apparently uninjured as a result of the great advances in vehicle technology that enabled them to survive improvised explosive devices, are believed to have been misdiagnosed with post-traumatic stress injury, when in reality they are suffering from mild traumatic brain injury. I believe that only two scanners in the whole country are capable of identifying mild TBI. There is not yet an adequate programme to make sure that the condition is discovered before irreparable damage is done.”
“May I add briefly to that catalogue of virtues the fact that Headway has been reaching out to parliamentarians like ourselves? The reason I am here for this debate is that Jo Hillier of Southampton Headway got in touch with me and asked me to be here. That is why I am learning so much more about this condition than I would otherwise have had the possibility of knowing.”
“I was not talking about tumours; I was talking about traumatic injury caused in explosions. My understanding is that only Nottingham and Aston Universities have the special types of scanners that can detect that particular injury. Will the Minister check that point and consider a screening programme for such people?”
“As the Minister knows, the Defence Committee is quite worried that not enough is being done to protect the defence industrial base. In advance of his appearance before us on 21 May, when we will look into some of these subjects, can he tell us how much consideration is given to the knock-on benefits of investing in production in the UK rather than buying off the shelf, given that the money spent is then channelled back into the British economy?”
“Given the 2017 law requiring everyone in China to co-operate with that communist country’s intelligence services, would it not be naive to the point of negligence to allow Huawei further to penetrate our critical national infrastructure, and should we not be grateful to all those Ministers, present and former, who have opposed this reckless recommendation?”
“Given the vital importance of the intelligence arrangements that we share with the United States, in the context of this particular crucial and worrying situation, will the Minister encourage the Foreign Secretary to persevere in his attempts to make sense prevail in the Cabinet, so that our intelligence relationships with the US and other Five Eyes allies are not put at risk by cosying up to the communist Chinese Government for short-sighted commercial reasons?”
“Like my right hon. Friend, I, on behalf of the Defence Committee, received a number of representations from people involved with Welbeck who stressed the high quality of the service it provides. I cannot help wondering if part of the problem is that not all Welbeck graduates go into the armed services. Perhaps part of the solution is that part of the budget should be funded by some other Department to recognise the fact that there is an educational benefit that goes wider than just recruitment into the armed forces.”
“Can the Minister tell me how long it will take to determine whether the new scheme is a success? If it is found not to be a success, will it be too late to go back to a continuation of the college-based scheme?”
“Do the Government accept that the telecommunications firm Huawei is intimately linked with the Chinese communist Government and their deeply hostile intelligence services?”
“Does the Minister feel, as I do, that the feebleness of the response to the Khashoggi murder and the butchering of his body has in some way encouraged the Saudi authorities to think they can get away with anything, no matter how brutal and borderline insane?”