Sir Julian Lewis
MP for New Forest East · Conservative · United Kingdom
“I will share with the House one particular case that is representative of many. My constituent, Mrs Gillian Pothecary, lost her husband almost a year ago. She wrote to me in July about her valiant but so far unavailing quest to obtain a civil service widow’s pension.”
“She said: “Mrs Pothecary’s…case falls under the commitment to be fully resolved by early September at the absolute latest. Capita has assured me that her case is on their escalation log and has been flagged for priority handling.” I rang up Gill just before coming into this debate and—you’ve guessed it, Dame Siobhain—she has not yet recei…”
“As the Minister seems to have run out of supportive Back Benchers, I shall endeavour to ask him a helpful and easy question. Accepting that it will be some years, to put it mildly, before we can eliminate our dependency on oil and gas, does he accept in principle that we are more secure if we exploit our own domestic oil and gas resources…”
“I warmly endorse almost everything the Secretary of State has said today, and I genuinely congratulate him on his appointment. In my first speech in this House almost 30 years ago, I promised to support Labour Governments as long as they supported the nuclear deterrent, the conventional armed forces and NATO.”
“On Monday, just as campaigners from the New Forest and Waterside were handing into Downing Street a 32,000-signature petition against the appalling and unfair outcome of local government reorganisation affecting our area, the welcome announcement was made by the Government that the local government reform proposals for Hampshire and three…”
“We are now in a situation that is worse than that at the height of the cold war, so the comparison we have to make is between what we are spending now and what we spent during the cold war, which was, in modern calculating methods, between 4.5% and 5.1% on defence. So let us not talk about increases to 2.7%.”
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“I apologise for coming late to the debate. While what the Minister says is absolutely beyond question, does he accept that where the defence of the realm is concerned, certain other considerations must also apply?”
“Does she accept that Russia traditionally respects strength and despises weakness and that the time has come to recognise that 2% of GDP is not enough to spend on defence when we are reverting to the sort of adversarial relationship that we had when we spent a much higher proportion of GDP on ensuring that this country was well defended?”
“No reasonable person can possibly doubt that the Russian Government have behaved with arrogance, inhumanity and contempt, not least in failing to respond to the Prime Minister’s deadline, which they surely would have done if they had known that they were innocent of this charge. In welcoming the Prime Minister’s expulsion of 23 diplomats who are really intelligence agents, may I ask her to make it clear that any retaliation in kind by the Russian Government will be met by further expulsions, perhaps including even of the ambassador, who spends so much time coming to talk to us in this place, bemoaning the poor state of Anglo-Russian relations?”
“Does the Leader of the House agree that any member of staff who feels that he or she has been bullied must have an absolute guarantee that their career will not suffer in any way if they make a complaint? If they have that guarantee, does she agree that the reputation of Members of Parliament should not be sullied by accusations that they are bullies unless a complaint against them has been made?”
“Does the Prime Minister recall that when Edward Heath expelled more than 100 Russian so-called diplomats in the early 1970s, it gave a blow to Russian intelligence operations against this country from which it did not recover until the end of the cold war? Does she also recall that when it was clear that a member of the Libyan embassy staff—which one was unknown—had killed WPC Yvonne Fletcher, a wholesale expulsion of staff occurred then? As it would be impossible for an operation to have been mounted by the Russian state without someone in the London Russian embassy knowing about it, does she therefore conclude that similar measures may well be necessary?”
“When sometimes people stress the point, which is not without merit, that when we talk about spending 2% or 3% of GDP we are talking about inputs, not outputs in terms of capability, I say to them that of course it is true that we could spend a huge amount of money on defence, but if we spent it on all the wrong things, it would not do us a lot of good. Conversely, though, if we are simply not spending enough on defence, nothing that we can do will give us the outputs we need.”
“At a later stage, having tried to lump together the defence budget with all other moneys spent on security of one form or another to give a global figure of £56 billion, he went on to say: “If we concluded that the total set of capabilities, optimised across that £56 billion, was insufficient to meet the threats, of course we would say that to Ministers. That is not a conclusion I expect to reach, but of course I always have the freedom to give Ministers candid advice.” I am rather worried if our top security professionals do not feel even a twinge of doubt about the level of priority that we are giving to defence.”
“I do not wish to point any fingers in any particular directions, but when the National Security Adviser appeared before the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy on 18 December and was asked whether it would be possible for him to recommend that the defence budget ought to be increased, given the fact that the security capability review that he had been conducting was supposed to be fiscally neutral, it worried me that he responded: “When I said that the 2015 review was fiscally neutral, it was fiscally neutral within a growing envelope.” In other words, he meant that there were certain absolute increases in the sums being spent.”
“Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh), for doing this today—to bring this subject forward time and again to impress on the House and the country that we are simply not investing enough in defence. My right hon. Friend the Member for Rayleigh and Wickford referred to pinstriped warriors in the civil service.”
“I might be a touch over-optimistic, but I get the impression that a sea change is going on, at least in this Chamber. It was only in 2016 that we first started to debate whether 2% of gross domestic product was a sufficient investment for this country to make in defence in peacetime. At that time, it seemed fairly outlandish to suggest that we ought to be talking about 3% of GDP or even more. It is not outlandish to suggest that now. Of course, that is partly because of the shift in the strategic situation, which my right hon. Friend the Member for Rayleigh and Wickford (Mr Francois) outlined so comprehensively a few moments ago, but it is also partly because of the efforts of colleagues on the Government and Opposition Benches—I pay tribute to my old friend, my hon.”
“So we were spending the same on welfare and defence—6%—in 1963. In the mid-1980s, as we have heard, we regularly spent between 4.5% and 5% of GDP on defence, and that was the period when we last had an assertive Russia combined with a major terrorist threat—the threat in Northern Ireland. We were spending at that time roughly the same amount on education and health. Nowadays we spend six times on welfare what we spend on defence, we spend four times on health what we spend on defence, and we spend two and a half times on education what we spend on defence. We have to ask what we mean when we say that defence is the first duty of Government. If it is the first duty of Government, it is a duty that is more important than any other duty, because if we fail to discharge it everything else is put in jeopardy.”
“Yes, and I will come to the issue of how we can use the percentage of GDP to track what has been happening to defence in a moment. I hope that the hon. Gentleman—a former Defence Minister in the Labour Government, of course, and a very good one—will try to be non-partisan about this for the simple reason that successive Governments are responsible for what has happened. What actually took place was, as has already been hinted at, something that has been going on over a very long period. Colleagues on both sides of the House have heard me recite this so often that I am afraid they might do that terrible thing and join in, singing the song with me. But I will just run through it again. In 1963, the falling graph of defence expenditure as a proportion of GDP crossed over with the rising graph of expenditure on welfare at 6%.”
“But in 1995-96—the middle of the 1990s and several years after we had taken the peace dividend reductions—we were not spending barely 2% of GDP on defence as we do now, but we were spending fully 3% of GDP on defence. From then on it was downhill all the way—”
“I will not defend what happened in 2010. I was a shadow Defence Minister for slightly longer than the duration of the second world war in the years up to 2010, and I was told retrospectively that the reason I never became a real Defence Minister was that it was known that I would not go along with what they were planning to do. So I am not inclined to lay down my life for the Cameron-Lib Dem coalition of those years. I did not do it then, and I will not do it now. Having said that, it is all part of a bigger trend, and I come back to my projection of the situation. At the end of the cold war, as we have heard, we took the peace dividend. We had the reductions, which were reasonable under the circumstances.”
“I will give way to my good friend the deputy Chairman of the Committee in a moment. I can remember Tony Blair on HMS Albion in 2007, looking back on his 10 years as Prime Minister and saying, “Well, I think we can say that we have kept defence spending roughly constant at 2.5% of GDP if the cost of operations in Afghanistan and Iraq are included.” But in fact the cost of operations should not have been included, because they are meant to be met from the Treasury reserve. The real figure over the Blair decade came down to 2.1% or 2.2% of GDP.”
“What I am looking for today is agreement across the House that we recognise that we should not be having almost theological debates about whether we are just above or just below the 2% minimum guideline that NATO prescribes to its member states for defence expenditure, but that we have to get back to the level—at the very least—of what we considered appropriate for so long, right up until the mid-1990s, when the Labour Government came in, which was 3% of GDP.”
“I will give way one more time, but I want to concentrate on the bigger picture, because frankly neither of the parties has much to be proud about on defence expenditure since the mid-1990s.”
“The truth of the matter is that we encounter black holes everywhere we look in defence. This brings me to my concluding point.”
“We are also supposed to be replacing 13 Type 23 frigates and supplying mechanised infantry vehicles out of this budget, and we are of course engaged in resurrecting carrier strike capability—another capacity that was temporarily lost after 2010. The first report of the Defence Committee in the new Parliament was entitled, “Gambling on ‘Efficiency’: Defence Acquisition and Procurement”. The word “efficiency” was in inverted commas because we believe that the affordability of the scheme is predicated on an estimate of £7.3 billion of theoretical efficiency savings that are to be made in addition to some £7.1 billion that was previously announced. As we have heard, the National Audit Office thinks that the equipment programme is at greater risk than at any time since reporting was introduced in 2012.”
“We should be agreeing about what we need in the future. If we are hearing a chorus of voices from the Labour Benches—it is music to my ears—saying that we have not been spending enough on defence and we need to be spending more, that is what we should be saying loud and clear to those people who seem to be perfectly content to spend the existing inadequate sums. I do not wish to prolong my contribution, but I do wish to speak briefly about the equipment plan that was alluded to in some detail by my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough. The equipment plan of 2016 is for £178 billion over 10 years. That includes a small number—nine, which some would say was too small a number—of new P-8A maritime patrol aircraft, replacing a capability that was quite wrongly dispensed with after 2010.”
“It depends whether the hon. Gentleman is talking about absolute figures or percentages of GDP spent on defence. In 2016, the Defence Committee produced a unanimous report called “Shifting the Goalposts? Defence expenditure and the 2% pledge”. We had the Committee staff use all available sourcing to draw up a definitive table of what had been spent on defence by Britain as a proportion of GDP over the past 50 years. The figures for the period we are talking about are: 1990-91, 3.8%; 1991-92, 3.8%; 1992-1993, 3.7%; 1993-94, 3.5%; 1994-95, 3.3%; and 1995-96, 3%. It then dips below 3% in 1996-97 to 2.7%, and thereafter it is down and down, with little blips here and there, until it is hovering around 2.5% because the cost of operations were included. The point about all this is that we should not be arguing about who did the most damage.”
“In the further contributions to this debate, I look to some magic formula that will take hold of our Defence Ministers, civil servants, National Security Adviser and all the rest who seem to think that all is well with the world when, confronted with threats such as we face today, we are spending a fraction of what we used to spend in percentage terms of GDP, and who are saying, “Everything is fine and we are on course.” We are not on course. We need to change course, and the direction in which we have to go is towards a significant uplift to 3% of GDP to be spent on the defence of the United Kingdom.”
“Throughout his tenure he played a very straight bat, constantly talking up how much more money was being spent on defence. But within a very short time of leaving his position he made an excellent speech—I believe it was on 22 January this year—in which he said not only that he feels that we need to spend more on defence, but that we ought to be spending 2.5% of GDP on defence by the end of this Parliament.”
“The House will know something of the difficulties that the Defence Committee has had in getting the National Security Adviser to appear before it on the grounds—he says—that defence was only one out of 12 strands in that review. The new Secretary of State for Defence has now had some success in regaining control of that one strand for the MOD. Nevertheless, there is something to be said for a very in-depth interrogation of the people who are currently charged with the overall design of our defence and security policy. At the present time, there is a degree of complacency by people who work in these Ministries. Then, as if by magic, the scales drop from their eyes the moment that they leave. Dare I say this in relation to our most recent former Secretary of State for Defence?”
“The hon. Gentleman is a stalwart of the Committee. I hope that he will develop that important point if he catches your eye presently, Mr Deputy Speaker. Obviously there has to be flexibility and a means of making adjustments when adjustments have to be made to very large sums during the course of an annual budget cycle. But we are talking about an overall shortfall that is so great that we are not going to get anywhere unless we recognise reality and accept that defence should not be so far down the national scale of priorities that it has far left behind those areas of high Government expenditure with which it used to bear straight comparison. I mentioned previously the National Security Adviser and his security and capability review.”
“I fully understand the direction of my right hon. Friend’s argument and I realise that it has been a great success for him and the new Secretary of State to regain control of the process for the MOD. If, as a result of the MOD’s examinations, the minimum recommendations on what the country needs to be able to deter threats and defend itself successfully require a significant increase in the defence budget—frankly, that is the assumption that has underlain many of today’s speeches—can we rely on the whole ministerial team to stand together as one and say to the Prime Minister, “We simply must spend more on defence”? That is what is required.”
“When we make representations to our Turkish NATO allies, can we also make representations on behalf of the tens of thousands of journalists and others who have been locked up by the Turkish Government?”
“Is it not about time we set up a charity called “Soothsayers Anonymous” for people who simply cannot kick the habit of predicting when conflicts are going to break out, when we are going to have opinion polls that are going to be accurate and when we are going to have economic forecasts regarding the EU that are going to be accurate, even though history has shown time and again that they are not worth the paper they are written on?”
“There are disadvantages to every policy possible, and people will have to make sacrifices. People do make sacrifices, and have made them. The question is: is it better to go down the route of endless court hearings, deepening divisions and the poisoning of the more positive links that have slowly and gradually built up, or is it better to take a leaf out of the South African book? I conclude with this thought: if it was good enough for Nelson Mandela, after all he went through and all that the people he represented went through, should it not be good enough for us and the Northern Ireland communities?”
“Today’s debate is only one piece in an enormous jigsaw that people have been trying to put together to come to a conclusion that enables the communities in Northern Ireland to live at peace with each other, and that—as far as we are concerned—ensures that soldiers who did their duty are not hauled through the courts many years after the event, when no new evidence is available. I hope that people do not have too great an expectation that the production of an individual report or the holding of an individual debate will do anything other than add to the momentum. One thing that the Defence Committee can claim, however, is that we have focused attention on one specific remedy that offers a way forward. If it was a way forward with no disadvantages, of course people would have signed up to it or something similar long ago.”
“From their point of view, it seemed to me—I hope I am not misrepresenting what they said—that one particular ongoing issue was the failure to hold inquests into the deaths of many of the people who died during the troubles. If we could set to one side, as a route of trying to get to the truth, dragging a succession of old men through the courts when there is insufficient evidence against them, and if as part of an overall settlement we could all decide to go ahead with a statute of limitations that applied to everybody, that might open up the possibility of inquests being held. A combination of inquests being held into deaths that have so far not had inquests, and a truth recovery process in which people know they can come forward to say what happened without any danger of incriminating themselves, might be the basis of a step forward.”
“I believe that sometimes people must seize the opportunity to take a lead. There is nothing of a legal nature to prevent this Parliament from enacting a statute of limitations. If it applies to everyone and is coupled with a truth recovery process, it will maximise the chance of people finding out what happened to their loved ones and of avoiding the poisoning of the settlement so far reached by a constant succession of cases being brought before the criminal courts. I wish to end on another factor, which I hope the Minister will take back to his colleagues in the Northern Ireland Office. I was particularly impressed by it in the meeting I had yesterday with two Labour colleagues, in which I met the Sinn Féin MPs.”
“I will go as far as I can without breaking any personal confidences, and it may be that I am misinterpreting the signals, but from my conversations with people on either side of the argument, I sometimes get the impression that they are held captive by the response they feel they have to make to the people who elected them and brought them to this House. I sometimes detect—perhaps I am wrong; perhaps I am misreading the signals—that, in their heart of hearts, they know that there is either going to be a solution that applies to everyone, or no real solution that applies to anyone, but they will never be able to articulate or promote that. It is a step forward that the Government have said that they will hold a consultation in which a statute of limitations will be one of the options aired.”
“We felt that it is for the Government of the day to go wider and decide what other groups beside service personnel and associated police and agencies ought to be included, but we did not shy away from pointing out that the unanimous expert legal advice we received from the four professors made it quite clear that if a statute of limitations were introduced for anyone, it had to be introduced for everyone. That will be very difficult to accept for the different parties across that terrible divide in Northern Ireland that we are seeking to repair. The Unionists take the view that some people should benefit from a statute of limitations, but not others. The republicans take the view that others should benefit from a statute of limitations, but not the people whom the Unionists wish to see benefit.”
“At the end of it all, in the vast majority of cases, it would almost certainly be found that they did nothing more than their duty and did not commit any offence at all. The Committee’s concern in the report had to be to make a recommendation about what should happen to those personnel. We were unanimous in our belief that a statute of limitations should be enacted for any troubles-related offences, or alleged offences, up to the date of the Good Friday agreement.”
“They asked me that age-old question: are you a Protestant or a Catholic?” Martin thought he had the perfect, truthful answer; he said, “I am a Jew.” They said, “Yes, but are you a Protestant Jew or a Catholic Jew?” I am not trying to be flippant; I am trying to indicate that there are irreconcilable and deep-seated beliefs at work here. The role of the Defence Committee means that our concern has to be for the welfare of the service personnel. We do not wish to see hundreds of old cases reopened, in the absence of any new evidence, which would mean that they were highly unlikely to be successfully brought to a conclusion—if a conviction is regarded as successful. People would nevertheless be put through a tremendous ordeal at a late stage of their life.”
“The trouble in the situation in Northern Ireland—I hope I will not strike the wrong note by seeming to be flippant at this point—goes back to the origins of the troubles in 1969. I went to university the following year, 1970, and while I was at university in Oxford, I made a friend called Martin Sieff. Members might deduce from his surname that he has the same sort of background as I do. I remember him trying to explain to me the depth of division between the communities in Northern Ireland. He said, “For example, there was one occasion when I found myself cornered by a gang on the street.”
“There, it was decided that in the interests of peace and coherence and the possibility of building some sort of united community, a line must be drawn, but that families must have closure and the best possible opportunity to find out what had happened to their loved ones. That led to people who had been involved in terrible activities coming forward and giving testimony, secure in the knowledge that, even if they were incriminating themselves, they would not be prosecuted. That is how there was some form of resolution for those people who had been bereaved, in the sense of public accountability and the discovery of the truth. It was not only a brilliant and magnanimous concept, but a legal requirement. There is a legal requirement to investigate; there is not a legal requirement to prosecute.”
“Any statute of limitations would not only have to apply for everybody—because if it were applied only to the forces of the state, that would legislate for state impunity, which is illegal under international law—but would also have to be coupled with a truth recovery process. We all know where we first began to hear about truth recovery processes: in South Africa, after Nelson Mandela came out of prison and changes occurred. The decision was taken in South Africa to draw a final line under all the horrors on whichever side, or by whatever part, whether we are talking about state authorities, revolutionaries or innocent civilians caught up in someone else’s crossfire.”
“Even though it happened a few years before I was born, I felt for years after the war that the people who killed them should be hounded forever, yet that is not the situation that we face today, because we have already decided that—in the interests of an overall settlement—there should be a limit of two years on the maximum sentence that paramilitaries can face, so by no stretch of the imagination can the punishment be said to fit the crime. I come to the second element of what the distinguished professors told the Committee in their advice to us on what would and would not be possible under international law.”
“However, I want to try to take a wider view, and I appeal to all who were involved, one way or another, in the tragedy that was the troubles of Northern Ireland to try to take the broader view, too. It has been put to me in very stark terms that people who suffered losses during that period, even if it was only 40 years ago, cannot rest until those matters are resolved. I share their understanding of the matter, and can perceive something of what they feel, because my family was caught up in the holocaust, and the part of my family who were still in Poland in the second world war was annihilated, with the exception of one very small family unit that was saved by courageous non-Jewish Poles.”
“The Sinn Féin MPs definitely thought that it did, yet previously I had it explicitly put to me by a lawyer for one of the service personnel currently facing trial that the two-year maximum, no matter how heinous the offence for which a republican or presumably any other paramilitary is sentenced, did not apply to the military. If it does not apply to the military, the imbalance between the unlimited sentences that can be imposed on soldiers and the two-year sentences—one year actually served in jail—that can be imposed on paramilitaries is so egregious that it is hard to imagine that the Government would not seek to impose at the very least a cap for all who may be affected by any proceedings.”
“As part of the agreements that have been reached after so many years, so many negotiations, so much death, so much tragedy and so much trouble, it was agreed that no matter how great the offence or how numerous the victims, if paramilitaries were convicted under the terms of the agreement, whether they had killed dozens, scores or even just a few individuals, they could not be sentenced to more than two years in prison. The likelihood, therefore, is that they would not serve more than one year in prison. There seemed, however, to be no agreement on whether that restriction applies to the military. I do not know if the Minister will be able to enlighten us today; if not, I hope that he will write to us with a definitive answer.”
“Only yesterday, for the first time, I was given the opportunity to have a discussion, which I welcomed, with three of the Sinn Féin elected MPs. I think it is true to say that they were interested in something that already seems to apply to republican paramilitaries, but they were not interested in something that would apply to the military, the police or the security agencies. There is also a certain lack of clarity, to put it mildly, about the present policy. As we discovered in our discussions yesterday, there is even failure to agree on whether existing limitations on the sentences that can be given to convicted paramilitaries apply to service personnel as well. What are the existing restrictions? I think we know what they are.”
“I have already alluded to the first condition, which is that the statute of limitations should apply to everybody. The second condition, which is a requirement under international law, is that there must be a proper investigative process for deaths that have occurred, even though that may not lead—indeed, if there were a statute of limitations, definitely would not lead—to a prosecution. I started to discuss the matter with various interested parties. The Democratic Unionists with whom I discussed it certainly want a statute of limitations applying to the military forces, the police and the security agencies, but they have grave difficulty with applying such a statute to former republican paramilitaries.”
“The Committee was worried that a similar sort of process would now begin retrospectively in relation to the 238 military-related deaths that occurred during the troubles. In the course of our inquiry, we took the advice of a panel of four distinguished lawyers who gave evidence. I drew a number of lessons from what they had to say. They told us that it would be possible to draw a line under the events of such a long period so long ago, if that was what was decided, but they assured us that it would not be possible under international law to do so in a selective fashion. They were quite clear that two conditions would have to be met if we wished to bring in, as the Committee felt that we should, a statute of limitations concerning troubles-related deaths up to the date of the Belfast agreement.”
“When the Defence Committee agreed to look into this question, we delved into it very much from the point of view of what was technically possible, and what was impossible for reasons of international law. From the beginning of the troubles in 1969 to the signing of the Good Friday agreement, there were 3,260 troubles-related deaths. Of those, 238 were the result of engagements by military personnel. The Committee was particularly exercised by recent events. As a result of the much more recent campaign in Iraq, soldiers were being brought to court, and it appeared that thousands of cases would have to be investigated, despite the fact that at the end of long, tortuous and expensive processes, the vast majority were found to be without much, or indeed any, substance.”
“I beg to move, That this House has considered the Seventh Report of the Defence Committee, Investigations into fatalities in Northern Ireland involving British military personnel, Session 2016-17, HC 1064, and the Government response, HC 549. It is a pleasure to introduce today’s important debate under your chairmanship, Sir David. My interest in the topic was first sparked by contributions made at an end-of-term debate by my hon. and gallant Friends the Members for Beckenham (Bob Stewart) and for Filton and Bradley Stoke (Jack Lopresti), both of whom are here today, although sadly one of them, as a Parliamentary Private Secretary, cannot contribute personally to the debate.”
“If there is a way in which we can do what the report does—that is, support a statute of limitations for service personnel and analogous organisations, such as the police and the security agencies—without incurring a breach of international law, I would like to know what it is, because the evidence that we were given was that we could not.”
“That said, it remains absolutely unacceptable that service personnel will have to go through the sort of ordeal that Dennis Hutchings is going through. It seems to me that there are only two ways to prevent that: getting rid of the international law that requires such matters to be investigated in the way that it does, and having a statute of limitations. The international law, namely the Human Rights Act, says that if we have a statute of limitations, it must apply to everyone. I see my good friend the hon. Member for Belfast East (Gavin Robinson) dissenting from that proposition, but that is the testimony that we were given by legal experts.”