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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“For example, we produced a report entitled, “Open Source Stupidity”—I think that is probably the first time the word “stupidity” has appeared in an official Select Committee report title—referring to the fact that, for £25 million a year, we need not close the BBC Monitoring centre at Caversham. It is not too late to reverse that extremely stupid decision; and I am glad that the Foreign Secretary, the Chairmen of the Foreign Affairs Committee and the International Development Committee and I will have the opportunity to visit that excellent establishment soon, in the hope that we can, even now, prevent that folly from proceeding.”
“The idea that anyone could be my right hon. Friend’s boss on the Defence Committee is polite, but fanciful. Is our decision-making process adequate to produce a strategy? In a word, no. We have got to a situation where the chiefs of staff are too divorced from strategy-making. They are then left to have to make cuts in capacity themselves, while they are not able to get together to thrash out a joint strategy in the way that the Chiefs of Staff Committee traditionally did. Finally, is our soft power adequately resourced? It could be, but the signs are not promising.”
“Will the Leader of the House draw the attention of all relevant Ministers a very important ten-minute rule Bill that will be introduced on Wednesday week by my right hon. Friend the Member for Newbury (Richard Benyon)? It proposes the introduction of a statute of limitations to prevent the persecution, through legal process and the courts, of veterans for events that occurred in Northern Ireland up to 40 years ago.”
“I warmly thank the Foreign Secretary for suggesting that he and I should visit the BBC Monitoring Service at Caversham Park before the crazy decision is implemented next year to sell off the site and break our link with the similar American operation there. Will he remonstrate with his officials, however, on the grounds that 45 minutes for a walk-through on a Thursday is not long enough for him to see what is going on there? Given also— [Interruption.]— that the Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee cannot accompany us, should the visit not be altered?”
“Will the Government dust off the files marked “Cold war containment” and try to get the message across to our American friends and allies that a policy of containment while repressive societies evolve is the best way to deal with countries like Iran?”
“Thank you, Mr Speaker; it is always worth waiting for a good opportunity. As well as my perennial request for a statement about what steps the Government will take to protect our Northern Ireland service veterans from pursuit in the courts, perhaps I may ask for a good news statement about the progress made by so many schools and colleges in GCSEs and A-levels in recent weeks and months.”
“Given the time that will elapse before the cap is introduced, is there a danger that the energy companies will raise prices as much as possible in the hope of influencing the level at which the cap will be set? What will the Government do to prevent such a tactic from succeeding?”
“When BAE Systems says to the Government that this is normal business practice, will the Government reply to BAE Systems by reminding it that it is not a normal business, because it enjoys a near monopoly position in many parts of the British defence procurement structure? Will they therefore extract from BAE Systems a promise to work closely with the Government to examine to what extent any streamlining is really necessary and to what extent it can be ameliorated by common action, bearing in mind the special treatment that BAE Systems so often receives from the United Kingdom Government?”
“The widow of our murdered colleague Ian Gow has expressed dismay and disgust that hundreds of former soldiers face reinvestigation—yet again—over incidents that occurred 40 years ago, while her husband’s suspected killers walk free. Will the Prime Minister now introduce legislation for a statute of limitations, coupled with a truth recovery process, finally to put an end to this grotesque situation, as she is perfectly able to do?”
“I thank the Leader of the House and her assiduous Parliamentary Private Secretary for responding so quickly to the requests led by the Chair-elect of the Public Accounts Committee. Indeed, I thank you, Mr Speaker, for your intervention in getting the Select Committees up and running from next week. May we take advantage of the fact that there is a suspension of the usual arrangements in Northern Ireland to get a statement from the Government once and for all bringing forward a plan for a statute of limitations to protect our veteran servicemen from prosecution for acts that occurred during the troubles—many years ago—that have been investigated many times in the past? It is not right that criminals and terrorists go free while veteran servicemen face the possibility of long terms of imprisonment.”
“I know that several Committees have meetings—hearings—scheduled for next week that will have to be aborted if we cannot get this simple problem resolved this week.”
“On a point of order, Mr Speaker. I had planned to raise this point a bit later with, I had hoped, the Chairs-elect of other Select Committees, but as you are going to be vacating the Chair, I think I should raise it now. Can you throw any light on the apparent delays in setting up the Committee of Selection, which are being used as some form of excuse for even further postponement in getting the new Select Committees up and running? Is it not the case that the Chairman-elect of one of the more senior Committees has put forward a plan whereby the Select Committees could be up and running without necessarily awaiting the formation of the Committee of Selection? Is there anything that you can do to help us?”
“Will he do everything in his power to ensure that what happened to the Type 45 destroyers, and to some extent to the Type 26 frigates—as the build went on, they became increasingly complex and expensive so that we ended up with fewer ships at the end of the process—does not happen to the Type 31e?”
“Where warships are concerned, quantity is a form of quality because even the most powerful warship can be in only one place at any one time. I therefore warmly welcome the strategy, particularly its acknowledgement, in the section on strategic context, that: “There is a need for greater volume in the destroyer and frigate force if we are to deliver the required operational flexibility.” The Secretary of State mentioned the 1970s. He will know that in the 1970s we had as many as 70 frigates and destroyers. In the mid-1990s, we had 35 frigates and destroyers, and successive Governments incrementally reduced that to 32, 31, 25 and our current total of 19, which the Select Committee on Defence described as “woefully inadequate”. My right hon. Friend is entirely on the right lines in saying that we need to grow the fleet.”
“Did the Secretary of State read the letter in the press by the widow of our late colleague, Ian Gow, contrasting the fact that the two IRA murderers suspected of killing him have no fear of arrest with the recent revelation that hundreds, if not thousands, of letters are being sent out to veterans of the troubles with a view to further prosecutions? Will he support the policy of a statute of limitations to put an end to this grotesque inequality of treatment?”
“Have not the exchanges this afternoon shown once again that the Opposition’s position is that any agreement at all, no matter how bad for Britain and no matter how extortionate, is better than a clean break in 2019 if a good deal for Britain is not then on offer? Does it remain Government policy that a clean break in 2019 is better than a bad deal, as it may lead to more fruitful negotiations further down the line after we have actually left the European Union?”
“May I urge the Foreign Secretary to cheer up a bit and to cast his mind back 53 years to 1964, when red China, led by Mao Tse Tung, who was every bit as much of a murderous maniac as the current leader of North Korea, was about to acquire nuclear weapons? May I ask my right hon. Friend to face up to a couple of hard facts? First, he is clearly right to say that North Korea is determined on this path. Secondly, he is clearly right to say that China could stop it, but probably will not do so. Thirdly, if North Korea is determined to get nuclear weapons, it will get them and, what is more, we will deter it from using them. That is what happened with China, which we are now looking at as our friends, although it used to be led by exactly the same sort of regime.”
“I thank the Minister for saying that no decision has yet been taken about which Department will run the inquiry. Does she agree that perception is as important as reality in this matter, and therefore will she gain from this occasion a mindfulness of the weight placed by hon. Members, on both sides of the House, on the idea that the inquiry perhaps would be perceived to be more objective if some other Department took the lead?”
“May I thank the Leader of the House for her efforts to get business on track as quickly as possible? Connected to that, as Select Committee memberships will finally be settled on the first day back, which is the Tuesday, may we have an assurance that the relevant motion will be tabled at the earliest possible opportunity, namely the Wednesday, so that we can have meetings in the first week back? That would enable us to get approval, possibly even for public hearings in the normal way, in the second week back, rather than having to wait until October.”
“Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker. The reason why, surely, these cities have not been liberated sooner is precisely the care that is being taken in the targeting of the aerial bombardment. Does the Secretary of State accept that whereas the intervention with airstrikes in Iraq was non-controversial because we were prepared to see the army of the Iraqi Government win, the same does not apply in Syria? Apart from the Kurdish elements in Syria, who else does he expect to run the country when Daesh’s land is taken from it, if not the Syrian Government, with or without Assad?”
“I apologise to the Minister because I have to be briefly absent for part of the debate, but I will return at the earliest opportunity. I know that props are not always welcome in the Chamber, but in the light of what he said about photographs, may I share with him a pair of photographs? They show Passchendaele village in June 1917 and in December 1917, and it is possible even from a distance to see how entirely the landscape was obliterated by the bombardment.”
“Its aim was to capture objectives at a distance of between 1,000 yards and one mile, and that was largely achieved. The pattern was then the same in the fourth phase, known as the battle of Polygon Wood, which took place from 26 September to 3 October 1917, with the objective of securing a jumping-off place from which to attack the main Passchendaele ridge.”
“The valleys of the choked and overflowing streams were speedily transformed into long stretches of bog, impassable except by a few well-defined tracks, which became marks for the enemy’s artillery. To leave these tracks was to risk death by drowning… In these conditions operations of any magnitude became impossible, and the resumption of our offensive was necessarily postponed until a period of fine weather should allow the ground to recover.” Thus it was that the second phase of the attack, known as the battle of Langemarck and lasting from 16 to 18 August, lacked any element of surprise. The Germans showed no sign of giving way. Next came the battle of the Menin Road ridge, beginning on 20 September and lasting for five days.”
“The third battle of Ypres would endure until 10 November and imprint itself on the British psyche to an extent matched only by the Somme disaster of the previous year. The focus was on the Passchendaele-Staden ridge, and the main thrust was delivered by General Sir Hubert Gough’s Fifth Army along a 7.5 mile front. The flanks were defended by the British Second Army on the right and the French First Army on the left. Having overrun some of the outer German defences on the first day, the British commander-in-chief, Sir Douglas Haig, then discovered that the weather was an even more formidable opponent than the enemy. The official history of the air war quotes Haig’s dispatch as follows: “The low-lying, clayey soil, torn by shells and sodden with rain, turned to a succession of vast muddy pools.”
“It was therefore folly for the British and French to wear themselves out in 1917 given that the balance of forces would change in their favour once the Americans arrived. Claiming that the Germans could stand the rate of attrition less than the British was no justification at the time, as we have heard already, and it is equally indefensible now. After the Arras offensives of April and May came the unprecedented use of giant subterranean mines in a successful attempt to break the deadlock. Nineteen mines were exploded under Messines ridge on 7 June with a force that could be felt on the far side of the English channel. Although surprise was achieved, strategic gain was once again lacking. Nevertheless, on the last day of July 1917, the crowning effort of the BEF was made.”
“In the spring of 1917, Russia was in revolution, albeit not yet a Bolshevik one, while unrestricted submarine warfare and the diplomatic disaster—from the German point of view—of the Zimmerman telegram had goaded the United States into entering the war on 6 April 1917. So did Britain and France really have to squander so many lives so fruitlessly after that date? Why risk the colossal price of failure when the balance of forces at the strategic level was shifting so dramatically? The German leadership fully understood the significance of American belligerency. They therefore gambled everything in the spring of 1918 to exploit the collapse of Russia before the United States could make a real difference.”
“On the first day of the Arras attack—9 April 1917—the British Third Army took 5,600 prisoners, and the Canadians, who captured most of Vimy Ridge, took a further 3,400. This has been called the greatest success of the British Expeditionary Force since the beginning of trench warfare. However, the British advance soon ran out of steam as German reinforcements arrived, and the British Fifth Army had little to show for the heavy losses it sustained. Further major efforts on 23 April and 3 May 1917, partly intended to tie down forces that might otherwise be used against the French, simply added to the butchery on both sides.”
“He suggests that the catastrophic offensives prior to 1918 were in some way needed to enable the allied generals to learn the lessons they eventually applied to the successful campaign at the end of the war. I feel, however, that one should not have to waste the lives of legions of soldiers in the relentless repetition of unsuccessful tactics. Time and again, those tactics failed to break the stalemate, or to be exploited when, occasionally, they managed to achieve surprise. After the catastrophe on the Somme in 1916, there was really no reason to believe that a breakthrough could be made and exploited with the available technology of the day, yet this was attempted not once but twice in 1917. First came the battle of Arras, which was the second of the three huge attritional offensives waged by the British Army in 1916-17.”
“This was, by far, the greatest military victory in British history.” So it is absolutely right that, as well as commemorating all the disasters of world war one, one of which we are commemorating today, we will next year recognise the triumph of the battle of Amiens in August 1918. Like others who have spoken in the debate, I pay the warmest tribute to my hon. and gallant Friend the Member for South West Wiltshire (Dr Murrison) for all the great work he has done on this rolling series of commemorations of the events, failures and successes of the first world war. Professor Sheffield, whom I mentioned a moment ago, takes his thesis a bit further than I feel able to go.”
“Its author, Professor Gary Sheffield, regrets the extent to which the British success in those battles at the end of the first world war has been disregarded. For example, he says: “The burden of fighting the German Army fell mainly to the French and Russians in the first two and a half years of the war, but in 1918 it was the turn of the BEF.” That is, the British Expeditionary Force. “Between them, the French, Americans and Belgians took 196,700 prisoners and 3,775 guns between 18 July and the end of the war. With a smaller army than the French, Haig’s forces captured 188,700 prisoners and 2,840 guns in the same period.”
“Some blame political intrigue and poor generalship, others emphasise technology, with the battlefield dominated by interlocking fields of fire. This ensured that slowly advancing troops would be mown down by machine guns before making any worthwhile inroads into the enemy’s trenches. Minor advances, occasionally achieved, were usually reversed by counter-attacks or simply absorbed into a new, static confrontation a short distance from the original one. A book called “Forgotten Victory” is a study of the western front battles that rightly draws attention to the 100 days campaign in which the allied coalition won a sequence of decisive victories between mid-July and early November 1918.”
“There has been a remarkable series of speeches in this debate so far, not least the one we have just heard from the hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd (Liz Saville Roberts), and I will not usurp the role of the Minister in singling any of them out for special mention, other than to say in respect of the maiden speech we heard that the pride that the hon. Member for Bedford (Mohammad Yasin) takes in his town will no doubt incentivise him to be sure that Bedford will be proud of him by the way he conducts himself in this place. As other more knowledgeable speakers have already explained, a century after the appalling losses on the western front historians still debate whether any alternatives existed.”
“I am delighted that my mentioning of that phase of this terrible series of battles gave my hon. Friend the opportunity to pay that well-deserved tribute to his brave ancestor.”
“The award of the Military Medal to John William Feasey is now well and truly, and most justifiably, recorded. The next assault was planned for 4 October, and was persevered with despite a great deterioration in the weather. It was originally hoped that success at Ypres would drive the Germans away from the channel ports, as my hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Beckenham (Bob Stewart) said, and an amphibious force to help achieve that had already been assembled. The reality, in the words of the official history, was very different.”
“In any case, I shall have done my duty in my little way... Your affectionate son and brother, Glyn”. Glyn Morgan, who joined the Army straight from school, was killed on 1 August 1917. He was recommended for a posthumous Victoria Cross, and he was just 21 when he died.”
“Let us not forget that each one of these tragedies involved an individual personality, and I close with a quote from a young Welshman, Second Lieutenant Glyn Morgan, who wrote this to his father at the start of the Passchendaele offensive: “You, I know, my dear Dad, will bear the shock as bravely as you have always borne the strain of my being out here; yet I should like, if possible, to help you to carry on”— this was a letter that would be sent only in the event of his death— “with as stout a heart as I hope to ‘jump the bags’…My one regret is that the opportunity has been denied me to repay you to the best of my ability for the lavish kindness and devotedness which you have always shown me...however, it may be that I have done so in the struggle between Life and Death, between England and Germany, Liberty and Slavery.”
“The questions that I asked then are the questions that have continued to be asked ever since; and the answers to them have never ceased to be most painful ones.” As I said at the outset, I remain completely unconvinced by the argument, which some people deploy even to this day, that it was necessary to undergo the catastrophic failures of the Somme and Passchendaele offensives in order to learn the lessons necessary for victory in 1918. There is testimony enough from senior military figures in the second world war, writing of their experiences as junior officers in the first, spelling out the futility of relentlessly sacrificing huge numbers of British troops in fighting unwinnable battles. One does not have to explore every military cul-de-sac over and over again, in order to stumble across a strategy that might actually succeed.”
“The ordering of more and more attacks in such an appalling “morass” was seen at the time, by him and his comrades, as “the grossest of blunders”. They recognised the need to relieve pressure on the French by keeping the Germans fully stretched, but he said that “as I watched from the air what was happening on the ground there were presented to me some terrible questions. Why did we have to press on so blindly day after day and week after week in this one desolate area and under such dreadful conditions? Why was there not some variety in our strategy and tactics?”
“The ground over which our infantry and light artillery were fighting was one vast sea of churned-up muck and mud, and everywhere, lip to lip, there were shell holes full of water. These low-flying attacks that we had to make, for which most of my young pilots were quite untrained, were a wretched and dangerous business, and also pretty useless. It was very difficult for us to pick out our targets in the morass because everything on the ground, including the troops, was the same colour as that dreadful mud...it was quite obvious to anyone viewing from the air this dreadful battleground...that any chance of a major advance or a break-through was quite out of the question.” We can see from Douglas’s memoirs that it was not just fashionable post-war opinion which came to damn the strategy of attritional offensives.”
“Over this devastated area, which had been reduced to the state of a quagmire, attack after attack was launched...For communication there were only the rough tracks which wound their way almost aimlessly across the mire, and wandering off them led to drowning. The Germans welcomed the rain as ‘our strongest ally’.” Many of the pilots in the third battles of Ypres were tasked to carry out low-level attacks against enemy concentrations on the ground. As Sholto Douglas later recalled: “In this job there was very little fighting in the air, and since we were flying at heights of only two or three hundred feet we were supposed to be able to see plenty of what was going on below us. What I saw was nothing short of horrifying.”
“He, too, regarded third Ypres as “the most terrible of all the battles of the Great War”. He wrote the following: “The Somme of the year before had been bad enough, and after that it was felt that the lesson of the futility of mass attacks must surely have been learnt. But it was not learnt, and less than a year later our Army was called upon to embark on an offensive that in so many ways was even more terrible than the Somme”. He continued by saying that Passchendaele “was the beginning of what was to become for those on the ground a long and indescribable misery…all the drainage systems were smashed in the opening bombardment, and eventually the whole area became clogged with mud.”
“Some ground was gained east of Poelcappelle and on the southern edge of Houthulst forest on 22 October, with fighter pilots doing everything they could to attack German infantry in trenches and shell holes, on the roads and in villages. And so it went on and on—a little progress here, a forced withdrawal there, and the final taking of Passchendaele village on 6 November by the Canadians who, with British assistance, extended their gains on the main ridge four days later. According to the official air historian, Passchendaele was “the most sombre and bloodiest of all the battlefields of the war”. One of the pilots who lived through it, and later reached the highest rank in the RAF, was Lord Douglas of Kirtleside, who, as Sholto Douglas, commanded 84 Squadron’s SE5 fighters when he returned to the western front in September 1917.”
“The weather was entirely unfavourable but there were hopes that it would improve, hopes based on the somewhat slender foundation that the abnormal rainfall of the summer presaged a normal, perhaps even a dry, autumn.” Instead of remaining a means to an end, the offensive had become an end in itself. At 5.20 am on 9 October, after two days of continuous heavy rain, the attack was renewed on a six-mile front. Sir Douglas Haig had decided that Passchendaele must be captured, so captured it would be. The cycle was repeated on 12 October in the hope of helping to prevent German forces from being switched to meet the impending French offensive on the River Aisne.”
“This is what the official history has to say about what happened after the outbreak of terrible weather: “The British line had now been advanced along the main ridge for 9,000 yards… The year was already far spent and the prospect of driving the enemy from the Belgian coast had long since disappeared. The continuous delays in the advance as a result of the weather and its effect on the state of the ground, had given the enemy time, after each attack, to bring up reinforcements and to reorganise his defences. Although General Headquarters now recognised that the major objectives of the Flanders operations were impossible of attainment, they were still anxious to continue the operations with a view to the capture of the remainder of the Passchendaele Ridge before winter set in.”
“Yes and no. We certainly had to resist German aggression, but that does not mean there was any justification, when faced with a stalemate, to keep repeating tactics and strategies that were wholly unsuccessful and counterproductive. The concept of the “big push” might have had something to recommend it, despite the obvious imbalance between the technology of the machine gun, on the one hand, and the lack of armoured vehicles to override it, on the other, in the earlier phases of the war. That might have justified a big push on the Somme in 1916, but it did not justify repeating the same lethal strategic nonsense a year later.”
“My constituent Lesley Hughes was infected with hepatitis C in 1970, but this was discovered only about three years ago. Will any consideration be given to those long years of suffering when the compensation scheme is put into effect?”
“These deployments are certainly defensive, as the Secretary of State stated, but they will be represented as offensive by the Russians. What measures are the Government taking to keep open a line of communication with the Russians, to make it absolutely clear to them that this would not be happening but for their own conduct in Ukraine and elsewhere?”
“Will the Government consider reinstating ring-fenced funding for the BBC Monitoring Service, given that its absence is leading to the closure of Caversham Park and a considerable reduction in the service’s defensive potential?”
“At the end of his statement my right hon. Friend referred to steps that could be taken if it were found that Saudi Arabia were misusing the arms that we supply. Will he expand on that a bit? The issue has come up before in the Committees on Arms Export Controls. If we supplied a consignment of sophisticated weapons for use in one way and it was used differently, or abused in defiance of the laws of war, what could we do to rectify the situation?”
“Further to that point of order, Mr Speaker. In defence of the former Foreign Affairs Committee, it must be said that I think that the reason for its withdrawal from the Committees on Arms Export Controls was the unauthorised leaking of a draft report; so that was a more complex situation than was first suggested. However, reverting to the question of getting the Committees up and running, given that I understand that the 1922 Committee, for example, has not held its elections and it would normally handle the election of ordinary members to the Select Committees, is there any way that the resources of the House might be involved in assisting this process to get under way more quickly in the absence of the election of members of the executive of the 1922 Committee to administer this?”