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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“May I gently suggest that my hon. Friend might want to go one step further? These extremists never hesitate to call other Muslims with whom they disagree “unIslamic”. Although I see the point of my hon. Friend’s argument that these people are not Islamist and not Islamic, just calling them terrorists and extremists is not quite enough. We need some context, so may I suggest “unIslamic extremists” as a possible denomination for them?”
“Given that there is going to be a split and that there will be an authoritative figure in charge of the management of the House of Commons, can the right hon. Gentleman tell us what would happen if there were a decision about management taken by the new director general with which the Clerk disagreed? What would happen then?”
“Does the hon. Lady agree that any advertisement should make it absolutely clear that the director general will have very considerable autonomy in the execution of their duties?”
“In our debate on 10 September, I suggested that the Committee ask itself four questions. I think we will find that those four questions have now been answered. Should a top chief executive officer be expected to be a top procedural adviser, too? The answer is clearly no. Should a top procedural adviser be expected to be a top chief executive officer? The answer is equally no. Should the two roles be combined by default in the future, as they have been in the past? Should the top procedural adviser be allowed, if the roles are separated, to overrule the top chief executive officer on management matters, or vice versa on procedural matters? I think we have learnt that the answer to those two questions is no as well.”
“Member for Blackburn (Mr Straw), and his Committee, that he has managed to reconcile two apparently irreconcilable views, and that the central question of whether it made sense for the leading procedural expert in the House of Commons also to be the chief manager of the House has apparently been decided. In my intervention on the right hon. Gentleman I asked what would happen if there was disagreement on a matter concerning management—not procedure—between the new director general and the next incumbent of the office of Clerk. If I understood correctly, he said that it would be decided at a level that was, in a sense, above the two of them, and that it would not be a question of the Clerk overruling the director general on a matter of management that by rights ought to be in the sphere of the director general.”
“The whole House should be grateful to the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr Heath) for his work on the House of Commons administration, not least for the masterly way in which he summarised current concerns and controversies and how they have been resolved. He also briefly mentioned a slight dysfunction in co-ordination between the two Houses, and I will conclude my remarks with a small and rather sad recent example of that. The hon. Gentleman said that there is a great difference between the atmosphere of this debate and the debate held on 10 September, and I agree. It is a measure of the success of the right hon.”
“That was precisely why the message went out loud and clear, on 10 September last year, that we needed to send for the marvellous negotiating and reconciliation skills of the right hon. Member for Blackburn, to decide once and for all whether the two functions should be separated.”
“It was faced with either making a single appointment from a very limited pool of top procedural advisers who would become, by default, the director general of the House of Commons—as if by some magical process of osmosis during their rise up the learned ladder of becoming a top procedural adviser they had somehow imbibed the skills needed to be a top chief executive officer or director general—or, alternatively, if it wished to go outside that very limited pool of possible candidates, it had to decide whether it was appropriate for a top manager to sit in the Clerk’s chair without having imbibed, by a reverse magical process of osmosis, the skills required to be a top procedural adviser.”
“I am delighted at the result, even if I do not entirely endorse the reasoning. I wish to say a word of sympathy, if not appreciation, for the situation in which the House of Commons Commission found itself a few months ago.”
“In just a moment, but I want to make one more point. I know my hon. Friend is concerned with the constitutional aspects of this matter, but I am concerned with another aspect. The new arrangement will not work unless the individuals who occupy the two posts—I am glad to see the hon. Member for Walsall North (Mr Winnick) indicating his approval—have their respective roles clearly in their minds. If either of them tries to play games of superior status, the new system will not work. We can construct the best system in the world, but if the people who occupy the top posts are not minded to make it work, it will not be a success.”
“My hon. Friend is fighting a gallant rearguard action for the old guard, but if the degree of management skill imbibed previously led to this spectacular spaghetti junction of an organogram of the existing system, there was something deficient in the in-house management training. Any Committee that comes up, by contrast, with something as clear and sensible as the new—”
“I am absolutely reproved, Madam Deputy Speaker. I was thinking for a moment that those ground-level cameras that have periodically appeared here might still be in action, but I see that I wasted my ingenuity.”
“Absolutely, Madam Deputy Speaker, but I always care to project my message in as many dimensions in the 21st century as are routinely offered to me. It is a measure of the success of this Committee that at least two members of my party who were greatly exercised a few months ago about every aspect to do with the appointment of the next Clerk are sufficiently satisfied that they have not felt it necessary to attend or contribute to today’s debate. I presume that their satisfaction has been reflected in the sentiments expressed from both sides of the House.”
“We were referred to a Committee of this House, although the decision was already cut and dried in the House of Lords. However, the demise—it must be presumed—of that 100-year-old club gives me an opportunity to pay tribute to a member of the Clerk’s Department, Mr Gary Howard. For some two decades, he gave up his lunch hour—his own time—to ensuring that the range was always manned, and that that great facility, sadly soon to be no more, was available to Members and staff of both Houses.”
“This is a time of anniversaries, and it is with sadness that I note that 17 February this year will be the 100th anniversary of the first committee meeting of the Palace of Westminster rifle club, because it appears that its rifle range in the basement must close as a result—and this is the part that is relevant to the debate—of the determination of the Administration and Works Committee in the other place that important fire safety equipment must be sited there. That is an example of the dysfunctionality to which the hon. Gentleman referred. The club has been going for 100 years and has members in both Houses, but Members of the House of Commons were not allowed to give any evidence to the Committee that made the decision in the other place.”
“It is pity that that could not be agreed before the House of Commons Commission found itself in the position of either having to choose someone who was good at procedure but did not necessarily have the top management skills or to choose someone who was in exactly the reverse position. It has been a long haul and it has taken a roundabout route, but, thanks to the good work of the Committee, we have reached the sensible destination that should have been apparent at the outset. The hon. Member for Somerton and Frome made the point that there is clearly work still to be done in the Palace of Westminster when Members in one House do not liaise terribly well with Members, or counterpart Committees, in the other House.”
“Yes, I heard that suggestion during the hon. Gentleman’s speech, and I was very impressed with it. I think it will provide an opportunity for the new director general to show his or her ability to stand fast in the face of what might be an overpowering atmosphere of tradition that might otherwise be used to divert him or her from the necessary serious determination that he or she will have to apply to fulfil the job in the future. I welcome the hon. Gentleman’s suggestion, and I hope it is carried forward. It is a pity that we have had to go through this roundabout route to get to the obvious conclusion that should have been apparent when it was raised long ago—that these two posts should be separated.”
“In return, I acknowledge the seriousness of the hon. Gentleman’s point about not finding anybody prepared to kill millions of people, but the logical conclusion of that standpoint is that we remain pacifists —[Interruption.] Let me explain. It would mean we could never declare war on any country, whatever the circumstances, because when we do, millions of people inevitably die. The question is, therefore: how do we prevent war? We do it by showing someone that they cannot attack us with these weapons without suffering similar retaliation.”
“While the Secretary of State is dealing with the Liberal Democrats—only two of whom I see in the Chamber today—will he confirm that a policy of sending unarmed submarines to sea and waiting for a crisis to arise, then sending them back to port to be rearmed while the enemy stands idly by, is actually more dangerous than a policy of keeping them in port all along? Will he also confirm that there will never again be a deal between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats to delay the maingate decision, as there was in 2010? That is something with which he had nothing to do, but which should never have been allowed to happen.”
“I will try to deal with this in the same theoretical terms as the right hon. Lady is trying to do. If her argument is that we have moved on from the cold war—it must be noted that at the height of the cold war she, as the head of CND, wanted us unilaterally to disarm—the point is that there can be no guarantee that we will not move back into a cold war or face some other threat. We cannot know what threats will arise over the next 30 to 50 years, which is why we need an array of deterrent weapons.”
“As always, the right hon. Lady is enormously courteous in giving way. It was discovered after the event that the Russians had been massively cheating on the 1972 biological weapons treaty. Therefore, it is the assurance of the underlying deterrent against other weapons of mass destruction that we have to worry about and be concerned with.”
“May I commend to my hon. Friend and the whole House the lyrics of a song that was prevalent at the Liberal Democrats’ last conference, which came from their own side? Sadly, I have not committed all the verses to memory, but they were wonderful, and the chorus was, “We believe in a part-time submarine.” It was sung to the tune of “Yellow Submarine”, made famous by the Beatles.”
“The hon. Gentleman, as always, is being very thoughtful on the subject. What he has said is true: the missile bodies are from a common pool that we share with the Americans. What makes a weapon system independent is not who manufactures it, and not who co-owns it—it is who is in a position to launch it if the need arises. There would be an enormous lead time to any withdrawal of the sort of co-operation that we need from America, so if there were any attempt at a surprise attack on the UK, because America does not have its finger on our nuclear trigger, the independent system is exactly that.”
“The hon. Gentleman says that we can look forward in anticipation of certain types of dangers but that there is no known nuclear threat. May I remind him of how suddenly the crisis in Ukraine blew up; if it were to develop, as it could, into all-out war that then spilled over into Lithuania or Poland, which are NATO members, nuclear deterrents might become very relevant indeed, very quickly.”
“The hon. Gentleman is being terribly generous in giving way. The fact is that his party’s policy, strange though it is, is to build another two Trident submarines, however they are deployed. Does it not follow logically, given the terms of the motion, that the hon. Gentleman and his party should vote with us against it?”
“Does the hon. Gentleman recognise that although the British deterrent is used all the time to deter, the only scenario in which it is conceivable that it would be fired would be in retaliation for someone having fired a nuclear salvo against us? Therefore, all the consequences that he mentions would already have happened, and the only question would be whether it would be worthwhile replying under those terrible circumstances. The purpose is to prevent anyone firing the weapons in the first place, and that is how we avoid the environmental consequences.”
“I am greatly enjoying the hon. Gentleman’s speech. Coming back to the real world, is it not the case that the need to have a continuous at-sea deterrent follows directly from the fact that we have a minimum strategic deterrent? We only have four submarines. At any one time only one or two of them can use or fire their missiles—they use them all the time to deter—but the fact is that if we did not have one continuously at sea, a surprise attack would wipe out the whole capacity.”
“Does my hon. Friend agree that the whole point of article 5 of the NATO treaty is not the question of which of the members of NATO an attacked country will look to to get most military help; rather, it is to take any uncertainty out of the question of who will declare war if a NATO country is attacked? Therefore, if a NATO country is attacked, our existing obligations are to declare war on the attacker. Does that not mean that we must be very careful how widely we extend NATO membership?”
“It is indeed a very divisive issue and it is one on which it is difficult to have a foot in both camps, although, as we have seen today, our friends the Liberal Democrats are doing their best to do that.”
“The result of that vote came about because of an agreement between the Front-Bench teams, with the motion being carried by 409 votes to 161. That vote represented something more than a decision taken in this House; it also represented, quite fairly, the general spread of opinion consistently in this country throughout the cold war and in the years afterwards. When the fundamental question is asked in poll after poll, “Do you think that Britain should continue to have nuclear weapons as long as other countries have them?”, almost exactly two thirds of the population say yes and almost exactly one quarter say no, with single figures or thereabouts, if my arithmetic is correct, for the undecided.”
“Tony Blair was still Prime Minister and he was proposing the approval of the renewal of the nuclear deterrent—the first stages of the process which should have got to maingate during this Parliament but are now due to get there in the next one. In that debate, we saw something interesting: almost all the Conservative MPs voted in favour of renewing the nuclear deterrent and keeping it in existence for the next generation; a considerable majority of Labour MPs were also in favour, but a sizeable minority of about 90 were opposed—they were the CND supporters who have been consistent in their principled opposition to nuclear weapons throughout their political lifetime; and also in the “against” camp were the Liberal Democrats and the nationalists.”
“I begin by saying a word in defence of the Labour party. Scottish National party Members seem to regard anyone who disagrees with them as trivialising the subject and anyone who agrees with them as taking it seriously. I personally greatly value the bipartisan approach taken by successive Labour and Conservative Governments to the maintenance of the nuclear deterrent. It is true that for a few years in the 1980s, the Labour party was captured by its left wing and went down the unilateralist road, but after two massive election defeats in 1983 and 1987, when the nuclear deterrent issue was central to the campaigns, the Labour party changed back to its bipartisan policy of nuclear deterrence. We saw that reflected the last time we had a vote on this subject, as far as I can recall, which was on 14 March 2007.”
“Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border (Rory Stewart), said in his excellent speech, one’s enemies or potential enemies have good reason to doubt one’s will and determination to stand up for the agreements one has made and to use the deterrent power one has to prevent war from breaking out in the first place. I was very surprised that the hon. Member for North Devon did not think that the events in Ukraine had any bearing on our discussions today. I think the events in Ukraine are highly relevant, particularly as NATO has a rather strange open-door policy to membership, which it should not have. It should not grant membership to any country that we are not prepared to go to war for if it is invaded.”
“I was generous in giving way to the hon. Gentleman so soon after he has made his own contribution. All I would say is that I know there was a vote on that day—that is what I just said—and if he tells me that a majority of Scottish MPs may have voted the other way, I accept that; but Scotland is, by choice, part of the United Kingdom and decisions on issues such as this are decisions for the United Kingdom as a whole. I do not believe even the SNP thinks that devo-max ought to include defence policy. If it does, we are in an even worse situation than I anticipated. We heard from the hon. Member for North Devon (Sir Nick Harvey), who is a friend of mine, about moving away from the cold war. What one moves away from, one can move back to, and more quickly than one anticipates—particularly if, as the Chairman of the Defence Committee, my hon.”
“It does indeed, and what really worries me is that because the intensity of the fighting has been so great, it is easy to imagine that it could spill over into a nearby country that is a member of NATO. If that happens, we would be at war with Russia. It is frightening to think what our summer would have been like if we had previously gone down the route of admitting Ukraine to NATO membership, sympathetic though we are. I remember that we stood by during the uprisings in central and eastern Europe that occurred when half the continent was under Russian control. We were very sympathetic to the Hungarians, and I remember with total clarity that we were terribly sympathetic to the Czechoslovakians, but nobody seriously suggested that we could go to war for those countries because of the geopolitical realities at that time.”
“It had a very damaging effect on our level of preparedness. Lord Hankey, as he later became, was the Military Secretary of the Cabinet. In 1931, as an argument for scrapping the 10-year rule, he looked back to that summer of 1914 and said that far from having 10 years’ warning of the outbreak of the first world war, we had barely 10 days because of the rapidity with which the various alliances triggered each other into action. Suddenly, from nowhere, we have found ourselves drawn into a conflict with practically no notice whatever.”
“Yes, and that should serve as a warning to us not to enter lightly into agreements that we have no intention of defending—I mean defending in the military sense. It is just over 100 years since the outbreak of the first world war. I remember looking back in the archives of the inter-war period when a great debate was raging over whether or not it was safe to continue with the 10-year rule. I have mentioned it in the House before. It is highly relevant, so I will mention it again. The idea of the 10-year rule was that the Government would look ahead for a decade and see whether they thought there was any danger of a major war breaking out. If they did not see any such danger, they would cut the defence budget. That was rolled forward from 1919 right through to the early 1930s when it was eventually scrapped when Hitler came to power.”
“We have seen authoritative statements in the press that no coalition will be entered into by the Conservatives unless it provides for an in/out referendum on the EU; similarly we have seen that no coalition will be entered into by the Conservatives unless it provides for passage of the draft Communications Data Bill. Those are two very important issues, but I submit that the future of the British minimum strategic nuclear deterrent is just as important as those two issues, if not more so. Until that vote is held, and held successfully, I shall continue to press those on my Front Bench for a commitment that we will never again allow the future of the strategic nuclear deterrent to be used in the way that it was in 2010 by a minority party in coalition negotiations.”
“They are hoping to obtain something that they can use in the event of a future hung Parliament, in precisely the way that the Liberal Democrats were able to use their bargaining power to secure the postponement of the passing of the maingate decision from this Parliament to the next one. I think that was a terrible decision and it set a terrible precedent, but I am greatly reassured by the strength of the speech made by my right hon. Friend the Defence Secretary today. When my hon. Friend the Minister winds up, I wish to hear that something will be done about the future of Trident and the holding of the maingate vote on time, as scheduled, in 2016 similar to what we have said about other areas of policy.”
“I am flattered to know that my hon. Friend the Chairman of the Committee reads my writings, and even quotes them back to me. I am very grateful to him. I want to stress that I believe that the SNP has chosen this debate today—I congratulate the hon. Member for Moray (Angus Robertson), who I am pleased to see back in his place to hear my contribution, on securing it—with a particular political scenario in mind. SNP Members know that the majority of Labour Members and their supporters across the country agree with the concept of nuclear deterrence. They know that an overwhelming majority of Conservatives agree with nuclear deterrence.”
“While democracies are usually reluctant to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear dictatorships, although they did so against Japan in 1945 as has been pointed out, the reverse is not true.”
“The most important argument, as I have stated in previous debates in this House, is the recognition that future military threats and conflicts will be no more predictable than those that engulfed us throughout the 20th century. That is the overriding justification for preserving armed forces in peace time as a national insurance policy. No one knows which enemies might confront us during the next 50 years, for that is the period we are discussing by the time everything is designed, constructed and deployed, and has served out its operational lifetime. It is highly probable that at least some of those potential enemies will be armed with weapons of mass destruction. Secondly, it is not the weapons themselves that we have to fear but the nature of the regimes that possess them.”
“I shall also try to be more concise in the remainder of my speech, Mr Deputy Speaker. All I can say to the hon. Member for North Devon, whom I greatly respect and admire, is that he ought to have a word with the then president of the Liberal Democrats, who proudly proclaimed on the Liberal Democrats’ official website that it was entirely as a result of the Liberal Democrats that we had not taken the decisive step of signing the maingate contract in this Parliament. I can only leave them to decide the issue between themselves. Let me return to some of the purely military arguments in favour of the continuation of the strategic deterrent, mercifully leaving the politics to one side.”
“If no other conflicts had been going on among proxies of the superpowers, one could have argued that they would not be likely to have been at each others’ throats if they did not have a nuclear deterrent. The fact that they were fighting each other by every means possible other than open war—state to state—on the European continent strongly suggests that the possession of the nuclear deterrent, and the balance of terror, had something to do with that stability.”
“That is an example of even Hitler being deterred by the mistaken belief that his enemies had a weapon when in fact they did not. The hon. Member for Moray made his points with clarity and calmness, as always. He said that he did not think that deterrence had worked. Of course, when something does not happen—that is, world war three—it is difficult to show that it would have happened if one had done something different. However, I always apply the test of the proxy war. The right hon. Member for Lewisham, Deptford (Dame Joan Ruddock) observed that throughout the cold war period many proxy wars went on around the globe. In fact, that is an argument in favour of the case that nuclear deterrence had something to do with the fact that the superpowers did not fight each other in Europe.”
“I tend to find that people wish to try to sweep aside the patent logic of nuclear deterrence by projecting on to historical figures events that did not happen and could never possibly be tested. The hon. Member for Na h-Eileanan an Iar (Mr MacNeil), who has now left his place, asserted that Hitler would not have been constrained by a nuclear deterrent held by the allies if he had had nuclear weapons. In 1943, Hitler proposed to use the nerve gas, tabun, which was far, far more deadly than the gases that the allies then possessed. When he consulted his chief scientists, they said that it was most unlikely that the allies had not discovered tabun too, and he therefore decided not to employ it, even though it would have had a devastating effect.”
“Even if that assumption were false, the attacker would find out his mistake only when it was too late for all concerned. An independently controlled British nuclear deterrent massively reduces the prospect of such a fatal miscalculation. The fifth military argument, which was mentioned earlier, is that no amount of conventional force can compensate for the military disadvantage that faces a non-nuclear country in a conflict against a nuclear-armed enemy. The atomic bombing of Japan is especially instructive not only because the emperor was forced to surrender but because of what might have happened in the reverse scenario. If Japan had developed atomic bombs in the summer of 1945 and the allies had not, a conventional allied invasion to end the war would have been out of the question.”
“The United Kingdom, for historical reasons, is a nuclear power, and it is much harder to defeat it than many other democracies by conventional means because of our physical separation from the continent. The next argument is that our prominence as the principal ally of the United States, our strategic geographical position, to which I have just referred, and the fact that we are the junior partner might tempt an aggressor to risk attacking us separately. Given the difficulties of overrunning the UK with conventional forces, compared with our more vulnerable allies, an aggressor might be tempted to use one or more mass-destruction weapons against us on the assumption that the United States would not respond on our behalf.”
“If a dictatorship such as that in Argentina had had an arsenal of even a few small atomic weapons and the means to deliver them, no matter how many conventional forces we had had, we would not have dared to retake the Falkland Islands, because we must not project on to other countries that do not share our political principles and freedoms the sense of self-restraint that we apply to ourselves. The third argument that I always outline is that the United Kingdom has traditionally played a more important and decisive role in preserving freedom than other medium-sized democracies have been able or willing to do. Democratic countries that do not have a nuclear deterrent have little choice but to declare themselves neutral and hope for the best or to rely on the nuclear umbrella of more powerful allies.”
“All that would happen would be that those near-misses, which have been discussed so eloquently today—the risks of nuclear Armageddon by accident—would continue between the superpowers if they are tangible risks, but we would add another risk: the risk that someone hostile to us with a nuclear armament could blackmail us into concessions, surrender or absolute annihilation. The risk of the deliberate firing of nuclear weapons against us is something that we would be crazy to accept voluntarily and unnecessarily. Returning to the reluctance of democracies to launch nuclear weapons against countries that do not have them—although we use them, as I have said, continuously as deterrents—we should consider the alternative.”