Sir Julian Lewis
MP for New Forest East · Conservative · United Kingdom
“I will share with the House one particular case that is representative of many. My constituent, Mrs Gillian Pothecary, lost her husband almost a year ago. She wrote to me in July about her valiant but so far unavailing quest to obtain a civil service widow’s pension.”
“She said: “Mrs Pothecary’s…case falls under the commitment to be fully resolved by early September at the absolute latest. Capita has assured me that her case is on their escalation log and has been flagged for priority handling.” I rang up Gill just before coming into this debate and—you’ve guessed it, Dame Siobhain—she has not yet recei…”
“As the Minister seems to have run out of supportive Back Benchers, I shall endeavour to ask him a helpful and easy question. Accepting that it will be some years, to put it mildly, before we can eliminate our dependency on oil and gas, does he accept in principle that we are more secure if we exploit our own domestic oil and gas resources…”
“I warmly endorse almost everything the Secretary of State has said today, and I genuinely congratulate him on his appointment. In my first speech in this House almost 30 years ago, I promised to support Labour Governments as long as they supported the nuclear deterrent, the conventional armed forces and NATO.”
“On Monday, just as campaigners from the New Forest and Waterside were handing into Downing Street a 32,000-signature petition against the appalling and unfair outcome of local government reorganisation affecting our area, the welcome announcement was made by the Government that the local government reform proposals for Hampshire and three…”
“We are now in a situation that is worse than that at the height of the cold war, so the comparison we have to make is between what we are spending now and what we spent during the cold war, which was, in modern calculating methods, between 4.5% and 5.1% on defence. So let us not talk about increases to 2.7%.”
The complete record
Every one of 3,750 lines we hold for Sir Julian Lewis, in date order, each linked to its source. Free to read, in full, without an account. Page 67 of 75.
“Why is it, then, that without having compared notes, we both find ourselves today urging caution in this scenario? My hon. Friend concentrated on his historical analysis. I will concentrate on a rather simpler analytical approach. It boils down to one clear proposition: do not make military threats that cannot be or are not intended to be fulfilled. If military threats are made under those circumstances and they are not then fulfilled, there is a danger that your credibility is undermined for a time later, when you might have to issue a threat of retaliation that you intend to fulfil, and your adversary will not believe you mean it. That is how wars can start by mistake; because people do not take each other’s statements of position seriously. Why does that relate specifically to Ukraine?”
“It is 33 years since I first met my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh), and it is a real pleasure to sit beside him in the Chamber today and listen to his very sensible remarks about a situation that might see him classified as a bit of a peacenik. [ Interruption. ] He snorts at the suggestion. However, the circumstances in which we met all those years ago were the depths of the cold war. We co-operated with our colleague Tony Kerpel and others sadly no longer alive, such as George Miller, to do everything we could to counter communist-inspired campaigns to undermine the defences of western Europe in general and NATO in particular. Therefore, I do not think that either of us has a track record of being soft on the Russians.”
“Yes, in an ideal world it would be, but there is a slight problem with that scenario, namely that the Russians have the power to impose a solution and nobody else is willing to fight them to prevent them from doing so. That is the hard reality. We may not like the situation any more than we liked that in 1968 when Russia imposed its will with the crushing of the Prague spring; but I do not think anybody would suggest even now, with the benefit of hindsight, that it would have been right to provoke world war three at that time. In situations where we are up against people with a lot of power, we have to contain them until political affairs evolve gradually in the direction we want them to go.”
“Such agreements are not unprecedented. It took us 38 years to reach some sort of agreement even in a province such as Northern Ireland, which was a rather less fraught or challenging situation than the one that we and the international community face in Ukraine.”
“Finally—this is the dread scenario, which really could happen—if we really were crazy enough to offer military assistance to Kiev and encourage it to think that there would be enough military supplies to enable it to overwhelm its adversaries in the pro-Russian parts of the country, it is an absolute certainty that Russia would respond militarily. In any conflict of that sort, Russia would prevail and it would not then be content to confine itself to the pro-Russian areas; it would invade and take over the whole country. It is what is colloquially called a no-brainer that if the Russians are determined—however wrongly, as my hon. Friends have variously suggested—not to let the pro-Russian provinces go, and they are not prepared to do so, the best outcome we can hope for is an agreed negotiation of autonomy for those areas.”
“I am glad that my hon. Friend agrees with me. Let me deal with the other two scenarios before drawing my remarks to a conclusion. The third scenario is a split. It would be either a de facto split, which is being referred to as a frozen conflict—in other words, the pro-Russian communities would end up in control of their areas, glaring at Kiev and vice versa—or a de jure split, which would obviously be a less satisfactory solution than an agreed decision to stay together with an appropriate amount of autonomy.”
“I know time is limited, but I wanted to point out that the only way we can defend NATO countries that are out on a limb is by having tripwire forces. That would show a potential aggressor that, while they might occupy those countries, they would let themselves in for a very long war with other countries that would be able, eventually, to liberate them.”
“That was not exactly an answer to the question on the Order Paper. Given that this country for decades spent more than 4% on defence, does the Deputy Prime Minister not agree that it would be a disgraceful dereliction of duty if the British Government ever fell below the 2% minimum recommended by NATO?”
“I am glad the Home Secretary just mentioned tackling the terrorists’ narrative. Does she have in mind in that respect not only taking down extremist postings on the internet, for example, but promoting a counter-narrative that exposes the fallacies of the terrorist narrative?”
“I applaud the constructive tone of the right hon. Lady’s remarks so far. May I take her back to the intervention by the right hon. Member for Salford and Eccles (Hazel Blears)? Most of what is being discussed is still at community or even individual level, whereas we believe that something needs to be done at national level that is comparable to the efforts made to counter Nazism in the second world war and to counter communism during the cold war.”
“Some of us feel that a seamless counter-narrative needs to be presented, and that therefore it would be more appropriate to set up one of the MISC or GEN Committees, as I believe they are called. Several Departments—I can think of four or five—could then have overall control of a counter-narrative that has yet to be properly generated.”
“The article reflects very much the views that I have been putting forward in this speech, but neither I nor the right hon. Lady had any contact with Mr Moore before he wrote it. It is always very encouraging when somebody of that calibre independently arrives at similar conclusions to those that one has oneself reached.”
“Why is there such reluctance to recognise that what we ought to be calling un-Islamic extremism, and what we certainly should not be calling Islamic State, should be confronted at a similar level, on a similar scale, and in a similar way to our approach to fascist and communist ideologies in the past? The answer, I suspect, is the fear of the pseudo-religious basis of this incarnation of traditional totalitarian, extremist doctrine. I want to draw the House’s attention to a particularly important article by Charles Moore in The Daily Telegraph on Saturday 29 November. It is headed, “We won’t defeat extremism until we understand their ideology”, with the sub-heading, “Stopping jihadists is one thing—but stopping them from wanting to kill is more important”.”
“I feel—as, I am sure, will many others—that it is a great loss, given her specialist knowledge and flair for this subject, that she has decided to leave the House of Commons at the next election. Should such an agency be set up in future, I can think of no better person to run it than the right hon. Lady—whether she wants the job or not. As we have heard, the Prime Minister has said, as far back as three years ago but also more recently, that it is not enough to tackle terrorism; it is also necessary to counter what he calls the “poisonous ideology” that underlies it. The Home Secretary now says that we need to tackle non-violent as well as violent extremism, so the message is clearly getting through, but there is still some way to go.”
“It requires the creation of a specialist counter-propaganda agency—I use the word “propaganda” in its non-pejorative sense—to develop a counter-narrative and to support communities in their efforts to challenge the extremists. This agency should operate under the supervision of a permanent ministerial committee on which the Home Office, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the Department for Communities and Local Government, the Ministry of Defence and the Department for International Development are represented. I assure you, Mr Speaker, that I did not give the right hon. Member for Salford and Eccles any warning of what I am going to say next, but I am nevertheless going to say it, at the risk of embarrassing her.”
“In reviewing our current strategy and policies to prevent people from being radicalised and drawn into extremist activity, we should, as I said in an intervention, follow the precedents of the wartime efforts to expose and denounce fascism and the cold war campaigns to counter communist totalitarianism. The extremist ideology of political Islam is a similarly totalitarian creed requiring an organised effort to undermine its appeal and to strengthen the long-term resilience of the communities that are most vulnerable to it. In order to succeed, this work must be owned by the whole of Government on a cross-departmental basis, working closely with local government in engaging with civic and faith organisations on the ground.”
“Thank you, Mr Speaker, for calling me to follow an excellent speech by the right hon. Member for Salford and Eccles (Hazel Blears). At the end of the Home Secretary’s forthright speech, she said that we are “in the midst of a generational struggle”. That is true, but we are also in the midst of an ideological struggle. That is the message that the right hon. Member for Salford and Eccles and I have been trying to deliver to the Government. Our message is that we are well served by our security and intelligence agencies in identifying and disrupting home-grown terrorists, but we lack comparable capacity to neutralise the ideology that infects them in the first place and to support mainstream moderate Muslims in challenging the extremists’ perverted distortion of Islam.”
“What one has to do is not to be shy about the virtues of democratic politics, institutions and ideas, or about denouncing the follies and iniquities of systems based on an ideology that stands in total opposition to everything that moderate and liberal-minded people believe.”
“The problem we have is that some people with a racist, radical, totalitarian, extremist, murderous ideology have found a way, in the name of their interpretation of their God and their Prophet, to do what extremists have always wanted to do, which is to enjoy untrammelled power over everyone else. One cannot mobilise a society or a community to counter that successfully if one confines oneself simply to dealing with individuals whom one has already recognised as at risk of radicalisation, because they will already be on the conveyor belt to an extremist outcome and, very probably, to a violent extremist outcome.”
“He says: “It is rather as if we were trying to combat Communism without knowing the theories of Marxist-Leninism.” He concludes: “Time after time, it is non-violent subversion that has prepared the ground for serious trouble”, and he warns against the danger of running around “trying to catch the bad fruit, instead of taking an axe to the tree.” This is a problem that we face at a scale that is not yet insupportable, but which could get very much worse. Somebody once said that the problem with the world is that the ignorant are cocksure and the wise are full of doubt.”
“They took large doses of the drug called ideology…It was supplied by pushers who might live in their neighbourhood, but might equally well live in Yemen or Aleppo.” Charles Moore refers to the calls that have been made to start a counter-narrative, but he notes that MI5, for all its good work, does not have—some would say that it should not have this; it is not necessarily its responsibility to have it—an ideological unit.”
“That only goes to show that the right hon. Lady and I do not co-ordinate our efforts as seamlessly as perhaps we ought, because I should have known that. Anyway, the important thing about the article is that it looks at the consequences and conclusions of our recently published Intelligence and Security Committee report on the terrible events in Woolwich. The main question in Charles Moore’s mind about the killers is: what is it that made them so bloodthirsty and so bold in the first place? Why did they want to do such a terrible thing? He comes to the conclusion: “Islamist extremism combines something very new—the power of internet technology—with something very old—the power of belief.” He says that the report establishes that “Lee Rigby’s murderers were ‘self-starting’”, but that “they were not lunatics or even ‘lone wolves’.”
“When I heard the hon. Gentleman, in his articulate fashion, make that point in an earlier intervention, I felt, frankly, that it was a counsel of despair. If he is saying— [ Interruption. ] Let me give him my answer. If he is saying that the only way to stop terrorism is to bring peace to the middle east, then, frankly, we are never going to stop terrorism. [ Interruption. ] I will let him intervene again in a moment if he so wishes. I want to put to him the more serious point that we have a Muslim community of between 2 million and 3 million citizens, but I am very pleased to say that out of that very large number, only a very tiny number resort to such methods. If the real cause was western folly in interfering in the middle east, that would still not justify what the tiny minority of Muslims are doing. I will give way to him again.”
“What I recognise is that the events the hon. Gentleman is talking about are legitimate in a democratic society for argument and disagreement, but not for resorting to terrorism.”
“Member for Salford and Eccles: we need to face up to the ideology in its purest and most evil form. It is an ideology. It is not the ideology of Islam. We must mobilise and support those people in the Muslim community who wish to tackle this matter, and we must not be afraid to set up institutions and organisations that are capable of dealing with this formidable threat.”
“Member for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart) said in his interventions, as we make our attempts—sometimes misguided and sometimes more sensible—to mitigate the outcomes of such conflicts, we should not be surprised if there is a blowback effect, to some extent, on the more volatile elements in the community here. I think that I have now got his point to his satisfaction. In conclusion, bearing in mind your precept, Mr Speaker, that one should never have more than one or perhaps two main points for somebody to take away from a contribution in the House of Commons or any other public arena, the point that I wish to urge on the Government is the same one that I have urged before with the support of—indeed, I should say under the leadership of—the right hon.”
“I absolutely accept that parallel. Many other parallels could be drawn that are similar to the one the right hon. and learned Gentleman has made so perceptively. For example, democracies in the 1930s faced the twin dangers of Soviet communism on the one hand and Hitlerism on the other, which is why it is understandable, although unforgivable in retrospect, that some people chose to back the Nazi approach in preference to meeting what they thought was the threat of bolshevism advancing against the western system of life and liberty. Therefore, one can indeed draw parallels with the twin problems that we see now. There is a thousand-year war between Shi’a Muslims and Sunni Muslims. As the hon.”
“The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right that these people are not steeped in the religion of Islam, and are receiving a perverted and simplistic message. Our side of the argument still needs to be put in a comparably efficient way.”
“That is precisely the sort of role I see the Government playing—not setting themselves up as Islamic scholars, but giving support to those authentic Islamic scholars who can speak with authority.”
“In the week that saw the publication of the report on the Woolwich atrocity, attention has inevitably focused on the killers and the social media companies that think it was nothing to do with them. May we have a statement from an appropriate Minister, therefore, on the failure so far to recognise the bravery of three people who did not pass by on the other side? Amanda Donnelly, Gemini Donnelly-Martin and Ingrid Loyau-Kennett sought to help Fusilier Rigby and confronted the killers. One of them has since suffered major mental health problems. Why has neither a Queen’s commendation nor a George medal been awarded to these three brave women, who clearly deserve them?”
“On the question of the lessons of the campaign, it is a fact that there are al-Qaeda-type groups in many other countries, too, and we must develop a doctrine—based on strategic bases and bridgehead areas, as I have endeavoured to suggest on previous occasions—to enable us to tackle those groups without having to take on nation-building from the ground up in every country where they appear, because that is an impossible strategy and we need a flexible, sensible strategy for the future.”
“Many of the specialists involved in the successful withdrawal of heavy equipment from Afghanistan are from the 17th Port and Maritime Regiment of the Royal Logistic Corps based at Marchwood in my constituency, and I hope that the Secretary of State will take this opportunity to confirm that that military port facility will be neither run down nor degraded in any way.”
“One thing not mentioned in the Prime Minister’s statement—and for good reason—was communications data. Whatever one thinks about the Communications Data Bill, our report did not focus on this matter at all significantly because it played no relevant part. Nevertheless, there was a serious leak at an early stage from the unredacted draft of the report, which was reported in a Sunday paper, saying that the report was going to concentrate on this area. Does the Prime Minister agree with me that if MI5 is going to continue to share so much secret material with the Intelligence and Security Committee, leaks of our drafts are absolutely to be deplored and might imperil our ability to do this sort of work in the future?”
“It is often said that, because of the mutual hatred between Iran and Saudi Arabia, if Iran got nuclear weapons, Saudi Arabia would follow suit. How realistic is that danger?”
“Many people are concerned about both welfare tourism and benefit fraud. Will my right hon. Friend explain how they might be diminished as a result of the new system?”
“When the carriers are happily operational there will still be one other gap at sea, which will be in marine patrol aircraft. Can the Minister share with the House any moves as to how that gap is going to be filled?”
“In welcoming the announcement about war widows, may I ask whether it is the case that a war widow who lost her widow’s pension on remarriage but who has subsequently become single again is eligible to have it reinstated and never taken away under any circumstances thereafter?”
“On a point of order, Mr Speaker. May I ask, while members of the Defence team are still in their places, whether you have been informed that we are in sight of having the statement or debate on the ending of the campaign in Afghanistan, and the lessons to be drawn from that, which we were promised a little while ago?”
“I do indeed pay tribute to Alex Salmond who is a very considerable figure. By resigning, he seems to have recognised the outcome of the referendum. If the referendum had voted yes, that would have settled the issue for all time. Does the SNP accept that by voting no, it has settled the issue at least for a generation?”
“I am completely undecided on the correct course to take when a vow that could well have influenced, to some extent, the result of a referendum was given without the authority of Parliament. Does not the whole process show the danger of panic reactions by all three party leaders in the aftermath of a single rogue opinion poll?”
“Am I right in thinking that my hon. Friend has referred to the fact that Germany—the country on which this debate is focused—has a sort of parliamentary supremacy as a safeguard in its legislation, and that that is what he has tried to introduce for the United Kingdom? Can he tell us how well it works for Germany?”
“I wish I had £5 for every time somebody involved with the European project has said, “The high point”—or the high-water mark, or something else of that sort—“of European integration has now been reached.” Funnily enough, there is always one high-water mark after another. Frankly, I am getting fed up with it.”
“The idea was that countries could be made to merge with each other not by telling them directly what the end product would be, but by drawing them through imperceptible degrees and through the exercise and creation of new common functions into an ever-closer relationship, so that they did not realise where they were going until they had already arrived at their destination. I must admit that I was sceptical. I thought that countries might start on that path but that at some point they would wake up, realise the destination, decide that they did not want it and turn back. I admit that I have had to qualify my scepticism over the subsequent decades because, time and again, I have seen our country being drawn down that route.”
“I do not know which of those two strands is the primary motivation among German democratic politicians. Some of them may indeed be afraid of their country’s past being repeated; others may actually covet ways of gaining, through peaceful methods involving the slow absorption of other countries that are gradually drawn into the EU net, the sort of influence that they failed to gain in the past. In the 1970s I studied the theory of international relations under the great Professor Sir Michael Howard, as he now is. One of the topics I studied was integration theory.”
“There seem to be two strands to the idea of Germany in Europe, and the first strand appears to have something in common with what used to be said in the early years of NATO, which, as we all know, was once described as being designed “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down”. In other words the idea was that, because Germany had twice brought world war to the European continent, the best way of preventing it happening again was to tie Germany into multinational alliances and institutions. That is one point of view; the other point of view is that it is not only about trying to prevent war in Europe. The question is whether it is an alternative way for Germany to exercise the sort of power and control in Europe that she failed to get by other means in those two terrible conflicts.”
“On two grounds in particular, no one could be better qualified to introduce such a debate than my hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Sir William Cash). First, as we have heard, his father won the military cross but also lost his life fighting to liberate France from German occupation in 1944. Secondly, although of course I knew that he is Chair of the European Scrutiny Committee, I did not learn until today that he has served on that Committee scrutinising Euro-legislation for the last 30 years, which is an exercise in self-flagellation bordering on the heroic.”
“In 1997 it was an act of rebellion for a Conservative candidate in the general election to campaign against the UK joining the single currency. Indeed, I had to resign my post at Conservative central office in order to do so. In the lifetime of this Parliament it was also an act of rebellion for a Conservative Member to vote for an in/out referendum. Both those rebellions are now seen as core Conservative commitments, and even the Labour party and many others, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Wokingham (Mr Redwood) said in his outstanding speech, would not dream of going to the electorate pledging themselves to trying to join the single European currency. That shows that, over time, progress can be made in opening people’s eyes to what is at stake with Britain’s troubled relationship with the European Union.”
“Indeed. The process has become such a habit that the mask slips very rarely; but there was one notable occasion when the mask did slip. On new year’s eve just over a decade ago, when the European single currency was about to come into force, I saw the then President of the European Commission, Romano Prodi, being interviewed at midnight, and he was asked the following question: “This is a political project, isn’t it?” For once he let the mask slip, and he smiled beatifically and said, “It is an entirely political project.””
“I conclude by saying that just because one has a strong trading relationship with other states, it does not mean that one has to merge one’s currency, one’s economy, one’s population, one’s foreign policy or one’s country with those other states. We want a good relationship with Europe, but we are our own country, which is how we intend to stay.”
“I pay tribute to my hon. Friend who, like my hon. Friend the Member for Stone and my right hon. Friend the Member for Wokingham, has done so much over the years to try to arrest the slide to a destination that nobody in this country actually wants. The reality is that if there is a single currency, it will only work if there is a single economy. And if there is a single economy, it will only work if there is a single Government. And if there is a single Government, it will only work if there is a single country, which is what the architects of this scheme want us to have. Although they admit to each other that it is political, what they say to us is that it is economic and that it all depends on our economic and trading relationship with Europe.”