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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“It does indeed. I cannot think of an existing nuclear power that has done more than the United Kingdom to slim down and reduce the firepower of its independent nuclear deterrent. The response, as has been repeatedly pointed out by Government Members and by some Opposition Members, to those unilateral reductions on our part has been absolutely zero. There is not the slightest shred of evidence that if we were to abandon our nuclear deterrent completely any other country would follow suit.”
“The article wisely recognises the link between the two, because one thing we do not wish to do by removing the balance of terror and by achieving even multilateral nuclear disarmament is to make the world safe again for conventional conflict between the major powers.”
“He talked about our obligations under article VI of the non-proliferation treaty, which states: “Each of the Parties to the Treaty undertakes to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.” The only thing that is time-limited in that commitment is the cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date. We are not engaged in a nuclear arms race with anyone. We never have been and we have successively, as I said earlier, been reducing our capacity with little or no response from the other nuclear powers. The other two, open-ended commitments are to achieve nuclear disarmament and to achieve general and complete disarmament.”
“He said that he could see no way of preventing an atomic bomb from being used except by the fear of retaliation, and he illustrated that by saying: “A knowledge that we were prepared, in the last resort”— our deterrent has always been the final resort, if the future existence of the nation is at stake— “might well deter an aggressive nation. Duelling was a recognised method of settling quarrels between men of high social standing so long as the duellists stood twenty paces apart and fired at each other with pistols of a primitive type. If the rule had been that they should stand a yard apart with pistols at each other’s hearts, we doubt whether it would long have remained a recognised method of settling affairs of honour.” The hon. Member for Moray referred to a number of things that I will touch on briefly.”
“Exactly. That leads us back to the heart of what the concept of deterrence requires in order to work. Deterrence means that a potential aggressor must not only face a degree of retaliation that is unacceptable if inflicted, but be convinced that that retaliation is unavoidable. The key point about nuclear deterrence was made in a 1945 study by the leading defence scientist when nuclear weapons were first being considered as a concept. I love quoting the example—I have done so on previous occasions—given by Professor Sir Henry Tizard, who was one of the chief scientific advisers to the wartime Government, when he first considered what the atomic bomb would mean if it worked.”
“I do not think the hon. Gentleman has understood the three obligations I have listed. The first is to work for the cessation of the nuclear arms race—we are not a part of the nuclear arms race—at an early date. The second is to achieve world nuclear disarmament, and the third is to achieve general and complete conventional disarmament. I believe that those are, frankly, utopian visions that we work towards but which suffer setbacks according to the state of the world at any time, and the state of the world at the moment is one of grave disturbance and serious potential threats.”
“I entirely agree. I must bring my remarks to a close for the sake of other Members, but I would simply say that, although much has been said about the cost of the deterrent, so far as I know our deterrent has never amounted to more than 10% of the overall defence budget. Arguments about the deterrent must be made on the basis either that people believe it is necessary to have one to prevent this country from facing nuclear blackmail, or they do not. If people believe that a deterrent is necessary for such a role, 10%, 20% or even 30% of the defence budget is not too much to pay. Fortunately, we will not have to pay anything like that sum. It is comparable with the cost of the High Speed 2 rail system that we propose to build. In my opinion, our priorities should lie in a slightly different direction, given the cuts that defence has taken.”
“Time after time, when asked the key question about keeping a nuclear deterrent as long as other countries have one, people have shown in overwhelming numbers that they subscribe to the route of peace through deterrence. I subscribe to that, as do most Labour Members, but the smaller parties do not. It would be an outrageous betrayal of the first duty of government—namely, defence—if either of the two main parties, if there were a hung Parliament after the next election, allowed this matter to become a negotiating issue in forming a coalition. The issues at stake are far too important for that.”
“Yes, indeed. As I said, the evidence points in the opposite direction. I have covered the point about gaps in conventional capability. If the nuclear deterrent were scrapped, there is no guarantee that the money saved—all of it, or even any of it—would be put towards conventional forces. Even if it were, no amount of conventional forces can compensate for the absence of the ability to deter nuclear blackmail. We have heard in graphic terms the consequences of the explosion of a nuclear weapon. All I can say is that everybody agrees it would be a disaster if nuclear weapons were fired and exploded. The question is: what is the best way of preventing that from happening?”
“Her main concern in writing to me initially was that, given that the Prime Minister had said that he hoped to wrap the issue up himself, she was really anxious that we should not get to the general election—which is, after all, scheduled to be about five months after the deadline that the Prime Minister had set himself—without reaching a resolution.”
“This would have meant the end of the last calendar year. I said that my first point was that people are still being discovered who were infected long ago, and that is Lesley Hughes’s situation. In 1970, she and her future husband were involved in a very serious road traffic accident in London, and she had to receive no fewer than 44 pints of blood. For many years she knew nothing about the fact that she had been infected, although over those years she had many visits to GPs and hospitals with numerous symptoms of illness, and considerable pain and suffering. Only last year was it finally discovered that she had been infected with hepatitis C by NHS contaminated blood.”
“I was also struck by the question asked on 10 December of the Deputy Prime Minister, who was standing in for the Prime Minister, by the hon. Member for Coventry North West (Mr Robinson), because he said in that question what he repeated today—that the scandal had reflected badly on successive Governments, possibly going back as far as that of Harold Wilson, if not further. In the context of momentum being lost, he said that the Prime Minister had undertaken in June to look at and rectify the situation. In fact, according to my constituent, Mrs Lesley Hughes, who only a week before he asked his question had got in touch with me about this very issue, the Prime Minister had apparently told one of his own constituents who was affected by this that he hoped to have a resolution within six months.”
“Mr Deputy Speaker, having come late to the debate because of a clash with a meeting of a parliamentary Committee on which I serve, I am grateful for the indulgence of the Chair in allowing me to make a brief contribution. I wish to focus on three points. The first is that people are still, even now, long after the event, being discovered to have been infected with contaminated blood; the second is that momentum for a settlement is in danger of being lost; and the third is that the best treatment is not always available for those who have been infected. I was struck by what the right hon. Member for Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill (Mr Clarke) and others said about the debate being a chance to give a voice to individual constituents.”
“I wish to give others the opportunity to speak, but once again I thank my constituent for her bravery in allowing me to tell her story and attribute it to her, and I thank the House for its indulgence in allowing me to contribute to the debate at such a late stage.”
“Finally, I said that I would mention the other point about how the best treatment is not always available. I understand from Lesley, whom I have not met yet but whom I believe to be present with her husband today, and whom I hope to meet after the debate, that there are problems with the fact that many people suffering from infection are offered the older interferon and ribavirin-based treatment, and that not everybody can tolerate that, particularly as it takes a long time to clear the system, and particularly if they are people who are at a later stage of their life. If the Minister cannot answer today, will she perhaps write to me later about the situation of patients in that position? Kinder and more effective treatments are available, but are not always sanctioned for reasons of cost either by NICE or by individual health trusts.”
“That is exactly my view, and for that reason I wrote to the Secretary of State for Health, drawing attention to the matter. I received a reply dated 12 January from the Minister who will reply to this debate. Of course she was sympathetic in the terms that she used, but the important part of her letter was the conclusion, which was that “this issue is being looked at very seriously, and…an announcement will be made to affected individuals and MPs once work has been concluded.” My simple question to the Minister is, when will that work be concluded, and will she and the Prime Minister undertake to get this work concluded, on behalf of my constituent and many others, before this Parliament comes to an end? Otherwise, we are back to square one—a cycle which I am sure has been repeated over and over again.”
“My right hon. Friend has just made that commitment to continuous at-sea deterrence and, as I understand, it is the position of both main parties that the successor submarines for Trident should go ahead. Will he therefore guarantee to me that there will be no question of any delay in signing the main-gate contracts if we end up with another hung Parliament and the Liberal Democrats or Scottish nationalists seek to exact that as a price for their participation and support?”
“I do hope that this can be done before the end of this Parliament.”
“May I welcome the Governance Committee’s recognition of the obvious fact that the qualities necessary to be a first-class manager are not the same as those necessary to be a first-class Clerk? Has the Leader of the House followed up his pledge to me in business questions on 27 November to speak to the Prime Minister about the possibility of making an award for the three women who acted so bravely to try to help Lee Rigby in very dangerous circumstances? Finally, will he speak to the Prime Minister on the question of a final settlement for those people infected with contaminated blood by the NHS—sometimes decades ago? One of my constituents in that situation pointed out that the Prime Minister said in June on the record in the press that this would be sorted out within six months.”
“We are talking about ensuring that that minority remains a minority and that their poison does not leach out into the wider community and, in particular, that the counter-measures taken by the state against what they are doing do not have the effect of radicalising the wider community.”
“I fully accept that as long as there is a totalitarian ideology at large in the world, in most societies, even democratic ones, there will always be a few people extreme enough, unbalanced enough, criminal enough or at a loss and vulnerable enough for indoctrination to subscribe to it. Even in this day and age, we can find supporters of Aryan theories of Nazism and supporters of Marxist-Leninist totalitarianism, but the key point is that those supporters are absolutely isolated from the wider communities in which they live. We are not concerned about the ability to prevent, by persuasion or counter-indoctrination, every last person who is susceptible to becoming an extremist from becoming an extremist.”
“We are saying that what is lacking in the machinery is the ability to consolidate and wage counter-propaganda warfare—I use that term in a non-pejorative sense—against this barbaric ideology, and we are talking about doing it in a way that will have an effect at a much earlier stage of the process than most of what is proposed in the Bill as it stands. It is quite understandable, in the light of atrocities such as 9/11 at one end of the spectrum and what happened in that restaurant in Sydney in Australia at the other, that the Government’s first concern must be countering and impeding what in IRA terms used to be called the “men of violence”.”
“I rise to support the thrust of the argument made by the right hon. Member for Salford and Eccles (Hazel Blears). We have worked on these issues in tandem so many times that if they were put on to a DVD, we would be in danger of compiling a box set between us. However, by returning to the same subject again and again and often in the same terms in our campaign to get the Government to do more in this field, we are illustrating the principle that the Government ought to be applying when they do that—namely, if one is to win an argument about or involving ideology, it is not good enough to set out one’s stall a single time as though one were a university professor and to think that that is the end of the matter. One must keep the message coming over and over again until one gets one’s own way.”
“I disagree. When one is dealing with an intolerant ideology, one cannot simply say that one will, through some calm rationalisation, remove all the barbs, evil and poison. I am talking about what must be done to counter the pernicious ideology with which we are confronted.”
“Lady said, much of the focus here is on the obligations of various organisations and authorities covered by the Bill towards individuals who have already been identified as being vulnerable, at risk or on the path towards radicalisation. But we need to do something else. We need to try to create an atmosphere and a climate that is totally hostile to the propagation of the basic extreme ideology so that it becomes increasingly difficult to find anyone who is on that path to radicalisation because the whole concept of the ideology is anathema to society as a whole, or will be by the time we have finished.”
“The question is how we isolate them from the majority and prevent them from infecting the majority. In the amendment, my opposite number—and friend—the right hon. Member for Salford and Eccles and I are trying to get something stronger in the Bill. For example, we are trying to add to clause 21 words about developing “capacity to combat and reject the messages of extremism”. I am terribly sorry but the word “combat” is in there; I make no apology for it. The clause says that a “specified authority must, in the exercise of its functions, have due regard to the need to prevent people from being drawn into terrorism.” I think having “due regard” is a pretty weak obligation and, as the right hon.”
“It is fully understandable that a Government’s first concern has to be with the end of the conveyor belt at which fully formed terrorists spring into action, either on what they call a “spectacular” scale by killing hundreds or even thousands of people, or what we on the Intelligence and Security Committee prefer to call the self-starter end of the spectrum. We use that rather than the “lone wolf” appellation for reasons similar to the point made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden. But whichever it is, by the time we reach that end of the conveyor belt nothing can be done. I venture to say that even the best counter-radicalisation and counter-extremism programme will not prevent some individuals from getting on that conveyor belt and travelling all the way to the end.”
“Friend was talking about something slightly different—what we do when we are engaged in a battle of ideas—so I will give my right hon. Friend that get-out. But I make no concession to the hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire about using the phrase “a counter-propaganda battle.” That is exactly what it is. We used to wage it against fascism and Nazism and against communist ideology and extremism. This is the latest incarnation, albeit one that goes back to a time hundreds of years before those terrible and extreme ideologies came on the scene to terrorise mankind.”
“It is a battle of ideas; the people who subscribe to this extreme doctrine have declared war on our civilised standards of democracy and tolerance. I always mention—it so appropriate and someone always forces me, or perhaps I should say, incentivises me to do so—what the late great Sir Karl Popper described as the paradox of tolerance in a free society. He defined it in the following terms: you should tolerate all but the intolerant because if you tolerate the intolerant, the conditions for toleration disappear and the tolerant go with them. I make absolutely no concession to the hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire or indeed to my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis). My right hon.”
“Absolutely, and by using concepts such as “the war on terror” as part of our counter-propaganda campaign we may indeed be scoring an own goal. But in discussing techniques for what we are doing in this place, believe me, there are not a host of radicals hanging on every word we use in this debate about the machinery that we should set up. Once we have set up the machinery, we can then go into the niceties of which expressions we use and which we do not. But let us be frank; this is a battle of ideas. It is a battle between barbarism and civilisation. The hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire and others can shake their heads as much as they like but were I to make, for example, a similar argument against racist and Nazi exterminatory ideology, they would not blame me for couching the argument in the terms of a battle of ideas.”
“In reality, these extreme ideologies allow psychopaths and megalomaniacs to get to the top and exercise untrammelled power—but not, of course, for themselves. No, they are doing it because God has laid down that society should be run this way. I feel that, over many hundreds of years, our civilisation has torn down this edifice of extremism, and most of us feel that we will be damned—I use the word almost literally—if we do not stand up to prevent it from being re-erected in the heart of our own society or other societies.”
“Why do you think we should admire you for saying that you are signing up to this ideology?” A related point common to all these totalitarianisms is this: it is interesting to note how often everybody else gets wrapped up with the historic inevitability of whatever extreme cause it is or the God-given duty to follow it, but funnily enough, it is the people at the top who always seem to end up having supreme power over everyone else. Is it not convenient if someone is an megalomaniac to have to hand an ideology that justifies doing whatever the person wants to do in a society in which civilisation has broken down? As the famous philosopher Thomas Hobbes said, life would be “nasty, brutish and short” in such circumstances.”
“My hon. Friend is absolutely right and the insincerity of some of those who do these sort of things is an important issue. It is important because if we succeed in making adhesion to the ideology something that nobody in the community would want to touch with a bargepole, it makes it much more difficult for anyone motivated by the desire to say “Look at me: I’m this glamorous figure and I’m going on jihad”, particularly if they know that the rest of the community would respond with “What are you saying? Are you mad?”
“As I said earlier, the sort of counter-campaigning that needs to be done on the issue of extremist ideology is, in a sense, demonstrated by the fact that we have to keep returning to this subject until the House gets sick of hearing from us, and the Government decide that the line of least resistance is to toughen up the legislation and create an agency that will be able to supervise, co-ordinate and resource the efforts of moderates in our Muslim community to ensure that their own communities are not hijacked by the barbarians.”
“We are talking about a wider threat: the danger that, however effective we are in catching terrorists at the end of the conveyor belt that leads to their crimes, there will always be plenty more being fed on to the beginning of the conveyor belt by people who, shall we say, have a certain strategic grasp of what they are trying to achieve. I thank the Committee for its patience in listening to my speech.”
“The way to deal with it then was to ensure that every report was followed by another report—or, alternatively, a critical letter in the press—so that eventually the radicalisers and the counter-radicalisers would be neutralised, and the wider community would say “We are sick of all this bickering—why don’t both of you just shut up and stop?” We are not talking about some idealised situation in which we shall be able to let down our guard because there will never again be a small number of people who are willing to try to carry out terrorist acts at the end of the process.”
“I learned this lesson many years ago in an entirely different context—in fact, in several different contexts where time and again one would see extremist minorities hijacking moderate majorities and purporting to speak in their name. Where that sort of thing was going on repeatedly, it was almost like trench warfare or a battle of attrition. In those days, such battles would be carried out in the letters columns of the newspapers. A particular organisation or cause might get report after report in the media—and nobody would be answering.”
“Handing out a sentence that would be commensurate with the sort of sentence someone would get in this country if they have committed manslaughter and taken a life, must be a huge discouragement to members in these communities—mothers, for example—to co-operate with the authorities when they are trying to get their sons back and when there is no reason to believe that their sons have any evil intent to carry out terrorism on their return. That is why we sometimes feel there is a need for greater co-ordination and that the issues should not be managed within just one Department. We should try to work out an integrated strategy. Let me return to the point about counter-propaganda.”
“Indeed. It is certainly true that, for obvious reasons, many of these journeys are undertaken in conditions of great secrecy. I cannot help interjecting one of my concerns—I have to be careful not to step into judicial areas and I make no reference to any particular recent case even though there might have just been one—which is about judges who take the view that they want to set exemplary and terribly harsh sentences on people who have come back when we do not know whether they have done anything while overseas other than commit the crime of going overseas to fight in the conflict.”
“There is a vast difference between stigmatising individuals who are at risk, which is not proposed, and stigmatising a barbaric ideology, because the idea is to save individuals from being sucked into the ideology.”
“The hon. Lady is very kind. This will be my last intervention, so she has an open goal after that. I simply say that nobody hesitates to describe Nazi ideology and communist ideology in terms of their barbaric nature. If we are to succeed in saving people from being drawn into this form of barbarism, we have to get it into the same category, because, fundamentally, it comes from the same drawer of ideologies.”
“When insurgents such as ISIL break cover and seize and hold territory, they lose the advantages of secrecy and surprise. It should therefore not be too difficult in the short to medium term to expel them, but then they will go back to guerrilla and terror tactics. Will the Government have in place a medium to long-term strategy for containing that sort of warfare? We have lacked such a strategy in the past when we oscillated between nation building at one extreme and doing little or nothing at the other.”
“Unpleasant though the alternatives are, given that Russia will clearly not allow pro-Russian forces in the east of the country to be militarily defeated, which is the least worse of these two outcomes? Either those areas are allowed to become relatively autonomous, or the situation is fought to a military finish, the only outcome of which—given that the west will not intervene militarily—would be Russian occupation of the whole country.”
“I can imagine four principal scenarios in Ukraine. The first is that, in an ideal world, Russia will have a change of heart, or sanctions will work and she will withdraw and restore the pro-Russian areas of Ukraine to Kiev’s control. I think that a fairly unlikely outcome. The second scenario, which in my opinion would be the best, would be an agreed decision to create an autonomous area within Ukraine, comprising the pro-Russian elements and territories. The country could therefore continue as a political entity, but with a loose federal structure.”
“Friend the Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee that the Baltics must be our red line. I was very interested to hear my hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Beckenham mention in an earlier intervention how, during his time in NATO, he had expressed concern about the extension of the NATO guarantee to so many countries from central and eastern Europe. I must say that I felt we were stretching the elastic to its limit when we extended that guarantee to the Baltic states, but I accept that we have a long history of trying to secure the independence of those states, stretching right back to the days of the Russian revolution itself. Therefore, there is a significant degree of credibility that we would be willing to resist militarily an invasion of the Baltic states, but that is not true in the case of Ukraine.”
“I realise now, because I am rather more experienced in the ways of the world, that that would have been a counsel of madness, because given our ability to protect the country that we would be promising to protect, the promise would have been totally lacking in credibility. It totally lacks credibility to suggest that countries such as Georgia and Ukraine should be offered NATO membership. Not many people are present in the Chamber today, but I predict—I hope I never have occasion to see this prediction come true—that if the country about which we were concerned were a NATO member, the Chamber would be packed, and that is because we would effectively be debating whether we were prepared to start world war three on behalf of that country, whichever NATO member it happened to be. I agree entirely with my right hon.”
“Friend the Member for Gainsborough suggested, in danger of avoiding the realities on the ground. As I have pointed out before, when Russia stood in control of the whole of central and eastern Europe, there were periods when one country after another tried to shake off the communist yoke. We saw it in East Germany in 1953; we saw it in Hungary in 1956; and I personally remember seeing it in Czechoslovakia when I was 16 years old in 1968. At that time, when Czechoslovakia seemed to have got out from under totalitarian control, I argued very strongly that we should offer it NATO membership in order to try to protect it.”
“One must not give the potential aggressor any reason to gamble that he might be able to commit an act of aggression without facing the consequences. When countries came together to form the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, the intention was precisely to remove that uncertainty, which had existed in the 1930s. Then Hitler was able to gamble, while picking off one country after another, that the western democracies would do nothing. In fact, he got away with it in several countries, in a succession of aggressive manoeuvres, but then picked on one country too many and ended up involved in a war with the United Kingdom—or the British empire, as it still was at the time—on which he did not originally wish to embark. By talking tough in military terms on the question of Ukraine, we are, as my hon.”
“Friend the Member for Beckenham (Bob Stewart) agrees. We must consider the consequences of offering NATO membership without a serious intent to apply article 5 in circumstances of potential war. We all know what article 5 means: if any NATO country is attacked, the attacker is automatically at war with all the other members of NATO. I never tire of making the point I am about to make. I have made it many times before and I am not going to be deterred from making it again; it is, indeed, a point about deterrence. In order for deterrence to work, it is not only necessary to show that if someone is attacked, the consequences—the retaliation—will be unacceptable; one must also show that it will be unavoidable.”
“It relates to Ukraine because the danger of the approach we are taking toward Ukraine in our rhetoric is to lump that non-NATO country together with other countries that are members of NATO. I must say to my hon. Friend the Member for Maldon (Mr Whittingdale), whom I congratulate on securing the debate and on the way in which he presented his case, that I agree entirely with his view of the condemnation-worthy activities that Russia is carrying out. However, I do not agree with saying that if Russia gets its way in Ukraine and in places such as Moldova and Georgia, then its next step will be to threaten the Baltic states, because we must not lump these things together. NATO membership must never be offered glibly, lightly, or without thought of the consequences. [ Interruption. ] I am glad that my hon.”