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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“The Foreign Office does not always receive praise when praise is due. Looking back to the era of the closing stages of the Soviet Union, the Foreign Office showed great skill in the way in which it interlinked progress on human rights with other issues of contact between the two countries. Will the Minister confirm what seems to be the case, namely that there is a good institutional memory of the techniques employed in that era, which can be applied now in trying to take matters forward with China?”
“I noticed that my right hon. Friend said that a future majority Conservative Government would want to take steps to reassert this House’s sovereignty over EU legislation. Does that mean that we would not be able to take such steps if the Liberal Democrats were part of any future Government?”
“Will the package of reforms and the greater accountability put into effect as a result of the Mid Staffs tragedy have any bearing on other areas such as the all-too-prevalent cases of people being injured or even dying as a result of hospital-acquired infections?”
“Does the Prime Minister agree that the excellent work of the Royal Navy in the Philippines crisis well illustrates its unique capability not only to project power but to provide assistance around the world, and will not that capability be massively increased when we have two fleet carriers providing that sort of potential for the future?”
“I am keen to get the focus back on Iran. One way to do so might be to point out that if Israel were led by undemocratic, tyrannical religious fundamentalists and Iran was led by a democratically elected Parliament and Government who were constitutionally capable of being removed without strife, we might be having this debate about Israel’s nuclear weapons rather than Iran’s. The key lies in democratisation, or the lack of it, in the respective countries.”
“If ever there were a country that ought to be subject to a policy of containment, it is Iran. Sometimes I get the impression that the leaders of Iran are almost being deliberately provocative, so as to incite some sort of military strike against it to bolster their position with the population at home. I have no doubt that if Iran can be contained for long enough, democracy will emerge in the country and, as I said at the beginning, when democracy emerges the question of what weapons systems a country has or does not have becomes almost completely irrelevant.”
“I believe, however, that the possibility of the balance of terror may, in the end, come to be our only resource against Iran, because—as I said before —if Iran is determined to have nuclear weapons and if it is more important to Iran to have nuclear weapons than, for example, to have the sanctions against it removed, Iran will have nuclear weapons, unless somebody wants to launch a military strike against it. In conclusion, we lived through—what was it?—70 years or more of confrontation with the Soviet Union, and we survived that period of intense confrontation through a policy of containment. The containment policy meant that we neutralised the weapons systems of the power that could potentially attack us, and we allowed the slow development of internal political forces until that country’s system of government changed.”
“In his contribution, I believe that he was trying to suggest that Israel perhaps ought to give up its nuclear weapons and that that might improve the situation, and he ended his speech by saying that he did not believe that the balance of power, or the balance of terror, was the right way to keep the peace in the middle east. I am afraid that I disagree with him on both counts. I think that Israel giving up its nuclear weapons—and Israel is not party to the NPT—would actually encourage other countries to commit aggression against it.”
“I quickly conferred with my hon. Friend the Member for Wyre and Preston North (Mr Wallace) and I think that we both agree that ultimately if Iran chose to leave the NPT, frankly there would be nothing that could be legitimately done to prevent it from acquiring nuclear weapons, any more than anything could have been done to prevent Pakistan from acquiring nuclear weapons in the way that it did. I always refer to him as my hon. Friend the Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn), although we are on opposite sides of the argument.”
“Friend the Member for Kettering (Mr Hollobone), whom I congratulate both on securing the debate and on the way that he introduced it, we would be concerned today about Israel’s nuclear arsenal if Israel were governed by an extremist religious clique, and we would not be worried about Iran having nuclear weapons to anything like the extent that we are if Iran were as democratic as Israel is at present. Having said all that, we have to operate within the boundaries of what is or is not practicable. The reality is that if Iran chooses to acquire nuclear weapons, unless some state or alliance of states seeks to intervene in some military way physically to prevent it from doing so, Iran cannot be stopped from acquiring nuclear weapons if it wants them enough. As has been pointed out, Iran is signed up to the non-proliferation treaty.”
“Once the Soviet Union collapsed and Russia turned, however hesitantly, in a more democratic direction, we ceased to be anything like as concerned about its nuclear weapons systems. We became concerned about whether such systems would leach out of Russia into the hands of other totalitarian-inspired groups. We did not mind so much what arsenal Russia possessed—and continues to possess—provided that it remained in safe hands and not extremist hands. That is why the comparisons between Iran’s possession of a nuclear weapon and Israel’s possession of a nuclear weapon are, frankly, unfounded. As I said in an intervention on my hon.”
“They simply lied about the tonnage of their battle cruisers, the Scharnhorst and the Gneisenau, claiming to stay within the treaty terms, but actually breaching them. We must therefore understand that, in disarmament negotiations and military confrontations, what matters is less the weapons systems than the nature of the Governments who possess them. An example of that is our attitude to the nuclear weapons that Russia holds today, compared with our attitude to nuclear weapons held by the Soviet Union. We were desperately concerned about its nuclear arsenal, because the Soviet Union was governed by a system with an aggressive ideology and a ruthless approach to what it regarded as the inevitable confrontation between communism and capitalism.”
“I am pleased to take part in the debate under your chairmanship, Mr Sheridan. This weekend, we honoured the dead of two world wars. It was the horror of the first world war that led to a huge desire for peace and disarmament in the decades that followed. During the 1920s and 1930s, there were disarmament conferences and complex negotiations leading to impressive disarmament treaties, such as the Washington naval treaties. What happened afterwards was instructive. The democracies observed the treaties. The British Navy, for example, redesigned battleships such as the Nelson and the Rodney in strange configurations, to stay within the limits of the Washington naval treaties. The Germans had a much more practical approach to the matter.”
“But if there is no sign that the opposition will be able to overthrow President Assad, is not what the Government are doing and proposing rather unrealistic? Would it not be more practical, in terms of helping to stop the suffering, to try to negotiate a ceasefire between both sides without any preconditions?”
“The right hon. Gentleman is very gracious to give way when we are so pressed for time. May I invite him to return to the point raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Mr Cash)? If the setting of an earlier date is such a problem, will the right hon. Gentleman explain why amendment 22, tabled by his own colleague, the hon. Member for Ilford South (Mike Gapes), suggests the date of 2014? Although I was listening very carefully to the scintillating speech made by the hon. Member for Glasgow North East (Mr Bain), I am not sure that I heard him address that specific point. I would be very interested to know whether the Opposition intend to vote for that amendment.”
“Indeed, the failure to draw the right lessons from what happened at the end of the war had the consequence that after the second world war we were determined there would have to be unconditional surrender—so that next time nobody could argue, as they had done after 1918, that they had not really been defeated. Let us of course reach out the hand of friendship and remember the terrible mistakes made, but let us remember the victories, too, and the justice of the cause for which British soldiers, sailors and airmen fought and died.”
“It is a fact that the mistakes made at the battle of the Somme were repeated at the battle of Passchendaele, but it is also a fact that by the time we got to 8 August 1918, the lessons of those disastrous earlier offences had been learnt, however belatedly. The battle of Amiens, which hardly anyone has heard of by comparison with the earlier battles, was a stupendous victory for which our forces gain too little credit. Of course commemoration is about reconciliation, but we must not blind ourselves to the fact that those battles took place not on the territory of a country that did the invading, but by definition on the territory of countries that had been invaded. It should be a matter of pride for the people of this country that we fought on the right side in the first world war.”
“The force of character and personality of all those people who have been through these vicissitudes, ordeals and dangers cannot help but transmit itself to people of a younger generation. In the brief time available I want to make one point for the Minister to consider in his reply. It will not come as a surprise to him, because we have discussed it privately previously. I want to be certain that when, in the course of commemorating the events of the first world war, we focus on particular spikes in the history of that catastrophic conflict, we do not end up focusing solely on those events that marked terrible mistakes and defeats. It is a reality that the generalship behind the battle of the Somme was sadly lacking—some would say it was grossly negligent.”
“Madam Deputy Speaker, I am very grateful for your permission to contribute to this debate, particularly as the first ever televised session of the Intelligence and Security Committee meeting today prevented me from attending by far the greater part of the debate. I shall just make a few very brief remarks and hope that I am not unwittingly repeating things that others have already raised. We all have our different methods by which we have been in contact with or affected by the first world war. Mine dates back to my days as a schoolboy, when I became friendly with a veteran of the Royal Navy, Mr Leslie Horton, who served from 1915 to 1945 in just about every variety of royal naval ship. He served on the destroyer HMS Landrail in the first world war, for example, and the S-class submarine HMS Seadog in the second world war.”
“Despite the Defence Secretary’s criticism of the contracts, does he accept that the restoration of carrier strike capability to the fleet is an absolute strategic necessity, and does he also accept that one reason for the loss of Portsmouth as a shipbuilder is that the last Government reduced the total number of frigates and destroyers from 35 to 19—and, regrettably, this Government have done nothing to reverse that?”
“Yes, well, it is good to know that the review came to such a predictable and predicted conclusion, but what does my right hon. Friend think of the fact that our coalition partners, the Liberal Democrats, have not adopted any of the options from the review but have decided instead to come off continuous at-sea deterrence and have only two Trident submarines? This was rejected as unworthy of consideration by the review, but now that even the Liberal Democrats want two submarines, should we take up the suggestion of the shadow armed forces Minister, the hon. Member for North Durham (Mr Jones), and try to sign a contract for them?”
“It is my pleasure to present a petition in the same terms as that presented by my hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr Stuart). It is signed by Mr Peter Osborne and other residents of the villages of Minstead, Lyndhurst, Bartley and Bramshaw in the New Forest East constituency, and it requests that the House of Commons urge the Government to reduce the rural penalty in staged steps by at least 10% by 2020. The Petition of the residents of New Forest East Constituency. [P001254]”
“The hon. Gentleman is being extremely generous in taking interventions. A few moments ago, he said that he did not want detail to be released. The problem with the mass release of thousands of stolen documents is that nobody knows the detail before they release them and propagate them. Is that not rather different from whistleblowing on an individual error or abuse, when one is putting out there hundreds of thousands of documents that one has not even read oneself?”
“I hope that the right hon. Gentleman will—I suspect that he will—enlarge on that point, but will he mention the fact that that one Committee is different from all the others, because it is the only one that has access to highly classified material? Surely, that is the relevant point.”
“Further to that point of order, Mr Brady. Is there any way in which we can arrange for bogus points of order to be struck from the record, so that Members will be deterred from making them in future?”
“If these secrets are so sensitive, there is something terribly wrong with the system that allows an Army private or a junior technician access to them.”
“I genuinely congratulate my near namesake, the hon. Member for Cambridge (Dr Huppert), not only on securing this debate but on the way in which he presented his case and the exceptionally generous way in which he handled interventions. I hope that it will not damage his credibility on the left too much if I point out how very strongly I agreed with at least one of the points that he made in response to my intervention on him. There are three questions that I want to address. First, on which the hon. Gentleman responded, why is it so easy for junior personnel to engage in mass leaking? Secondly, is it easier than before, as he suggested, to track or spy on people? Thirdly, who should rightly be regarded as a whistleblower? That is the point that I was touching on when I intervened on him. On the first question, he is absolutely right.”
“In another sense, though, he is not quite right. The problem is that in the past, when we wanted to track or spy on someone, all we had to do was to get a court order to enable the interception of mail or telephone calls. Now, with so many new systems of communication, it is actually much harder to track and spy on people who ought to be tracked and spied upon, according to the process of law, because there are so many other ways to communicate.”
“If I remember correctly, his role was to be in charge of the signals liaison units, which comprised members of the special services who were involved in the distribution of the Enigma decrypts and who were spread around all parts of the military infrastructure that received that intelligence. In other words, they were crucially aware of the need to keep top secret material secure. As such, they had special security arrangements to prevent anything like the Snowden case and the Bradley Manning case from happening. There is a huge gap in the security arrangements for the handling of such material. On whether it is easier than before to track and spy on people, as the hon. Member for Cambridge has suggested, in one sense, he is absolutely right. We have electronic devices that offer more ways in.”
“I am glad to see the hon. Gentleman endorsing what I am saying. Any system that allows tens of thousands of top secret documents to be downloaded by such junior personnel in such quantity must be at risk. In an absolutely outstanding contribution to the debate, the hon. Member for Cheltenham (Martin Horwood)—I do congratulate him on his measured and exceptionally well-informed contribution—referred to the whole business of Enigma and the ultra secret of world war two. Colleagues might remember that in 1974 the book, “The Ultra Secret”, perhaps regrettably—historians are grateful—revealed the secret that, as a result of the development of the Enigma machine, we were decrypting codes during the war that people thought were unbreakable. The book was published. Its author was F. W. Winterbotham.”
“When I see somebody who blows the whistle on an identifiable abuse, I say, “Well done”, provided, of course, that they have used and exhausted all the right channels and were left with no alternative. But when I see someone who abuses their access to a massive database and then publishes it widely, I say that that is not whistleblowing; that is irresponsible—”
“Member for West Bromwich East (Mr Watson), whom I always admire, should be a little more careful before ascribing the term “brave whistleblower” to someone like Snowden. Snowden is no more a whistleblower than someone like Julian Assange or anyone else who gets a mass of information and feels that it is right to publish it and put it into the public domain for no other reason than it is classified secret or top secret. Basically, their rationale can only be that they do not think anything should ever be classified secret or top secret. Once they admit that there is a purpose in classifying some information, and that some information ought to be kept secret, then we get into the area of who decides what should be kept secret and what should be the result of whistleblowing activities.”
“In his defence of The Guardian newspaper, he said that it is precisely because The Guardian is not simply publishing everything that has fallen into its hands that it is acting responsibly. We can argue the finer points of that; he certainly has an arguable case. Where there can be no argument, however, is in the case of a person who steals the mass database and transmits it to other unauthorised individuals or organisations, or indeed newspapers, when he cannot possibly have read or in any way assessed whether the contents of that database had been properly collected or whether an abuse of the intelligence services’ powers had in fact taken place. That person is not acting responsibly, so the hon.”
“I entirely accept that point, which was partly covered by the hon. Member for Cheltenham when he briefly referred to the need to hoover up haystacks to be able to search for the needles in them afterwards. The question is whether we then have access to the irrelevant parts of the haystack, or legally supervised targeted access to those needles in the haystack, which can be detected as a result of modern technology. This is all about the mass collection, mass storage and interrogation of mass data so collected and stored. I now come back to the third question: who should rightly be regarded as a whistleblower? I would like to reach a point of agreement again with the hon. Member for Cambridge.”
“Did the Prime Minister have any conversations with our EU friends about his welcome commitment to an in/out referendum on British membership? Will he make it a condition of any future coalition that any future coalition partner must agree not to stand in the way of such a referendum?”
“As a member of the Intelligence and Security Committee, I leave the Chamber in no doubt whatever that if I had done what The Guardian has done in relation to the classified material that we see, I have no hesitation in saying that I would expect to be charged. My hon. Friend mentioned the D notice system. Does he know whether The Guardian used or was approached under the terms of the D notices?”
“Before my hon. Friend leaves the question of how well the House of Lords does its job, will he cast his mind back to 1984, when he had been in this House for a year and sought to move a sensible amendment to bring in postal ballots for trade union elections? That amendment could get nowhere because it was heavily whipped against, and it was defeated. But in the other place, where people listened to reason, that amendment went through, and so when the legislation came back here, the Government had to listen and take some parts of it on board, which they did, with very beneficial effects over the years that followed.”
“I regret that an investigation being carried out by the Intelligence and Security Committee has prevented my taking part in the debate. My hon. Friend has referred to the two-carrier solution. Does he agree that the only reason we can consider that solution is the Government’s wise decision to have the short take-off and vertical landing joint strike fighter on the carriers? Otherwise, there was no way we could operate two carriers.”
“On a point of order, Mr. Speaker. Sadly, this is one of my points of order that will not find its own salvation. You will be aware that it is very unusual for the head of the Security Service, MI5, to make a public statement about a leak of information, and in this case he has said that it has done extreme damage to the security of this country. Given that the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills has made a pronouncement that The Guardian has acted in the public interest in its role in leaking this information, have you had notice of any intention to have a statement from a Cabinet Minister on whether the concept of collective Cabinet responsibility still applies?”
“We have often been in this situation and found that we have not had enough time to debate important amendments. Would the Minister have any objection to some of the important amendments being put to the vote if the guillotine falls before we have had time to debate them?”
“Friend touched on: the military and intelligence relationship. As he rightly said, that is of supreme mutual interest, and it has paid enormous dividends to both sides over at least the past century. Only last night, I watched the rather splendid American film, “Argo”, which picked up a number of academy awards. It is about the amazing rescue, courtesy of the CIA, on the one hand, and the Canadians, on the other, of half a dozen American diplomats who had escaped being taken hostage in 1980 at the time of the Iranian revolution.”
“It is a great pleasure to contribute to the debate under your chairmanship, Mr Dobbin, and it is an even greater pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Lichfield (Michael Fabricant). He has been in the House longer than I have, so over my entire parliamentary career, I have heard him make many contributions—albeit that when he served as a Whip, he was silent for a while. He has now come back into the fold and has more than made up for that silence today. I can truly say that he has just made probably the best speech I have heard him make, although it is highly probable that he will exceed even that in the future. However, I wish to concentrate my remarks—this will come as no surprise to those hon. Members who know me—on a certain aspect of the relationship with the United States that my hon.”
“It took him on as an adviser and put in a tribute at the end of the film, pointing out that there had been two earlier seizures. One must not extrapolate too much from that, because of course the Hollywood view of the Anglo-American relationship should not be relied on any more than, shall we say, the more partisan, chattering-class, luvvie views of politics in certain sections of British society should be relied on. The truth is that the United States and the United Kingdom are at their best when the chips are down. Like people in all sorts of good, valuable and, indeed, invaluable relationships, they bicker and disagree, but when it really matters, they are always there for each other.”
“It is not the first time that it has done it. Something similar happened a few years ago when there was a rather splendid film called “U-571” about the American seizure of an Enigma machine from a U-boat in the course of the battle of the Atlantic. It was perfectly true that that had happened in 1944 with an American operation, but it had happened twice previously through the good offices of the Royal Navy. I had particular reason to know that, because my esteemed constituent Lieutenant-Commander David Balme was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for descending into the depths of U-110 on the first occasion on which such a seizure was made. When a bit of a fuss was made in the media, the film company backed down.”
“That neatly anticipates the point that I wanted to make, because it shows up one of the slight weaknesses that tend to crop up from time to time in the Hollywood view of the Anglo-American relationship. Quite unnecessarily, quite gratuitously, in the course of the film’s dialogue, there is a throwaway line, “Well, this country turned them away, that country turned them away, and the Brits turned them away.” At the time of the academy awards, I remember that they interviewed the British diplomats who had, at huge risk to themselves, taken the six escapees in and transported them hazardously to the Canadian ambassador’s residence. That enabled the whole story, which was eventually unpacked in this hugely adventurous tale, to transpire. I do not know why Hollywood sometimes does that sort of thing.”
“Perhaps our diplomats and Foreign Ministers should throw away the prepared script a little more often in the future.”
“So at the moment, it looks as though the system has worked. As my hon. Friend rightly stated, it was fascinating and entirely praiseworthy that having seen what the British Government had done in putting the matter to Parliament, and knowing that there was just as much disquiet in American public opinion as there was in British public opinion, President Obama decided to do the same thing by putting the matter to Congress. That is where it would have lain, but for the—what shall we say?—fortunate slip of the tongue by Secretary of State Kerry when he said, “Well, of course, if Assad doesn’t wish to be attacked, he could always offer to give up his chemical arsenal.” Never have words made off the cuff and in such an offhand fashion borne such fruit.”
“Even among the closest of allies, there may be genuine disagreements from time to time. The Americans genuinely disagreed with British action and French action in Suez in 1956. Harold Wilson genuinely disagreed with the Americans, and most people think that history has vindicated him in not joining with the Americans to participate in the conduct of the Vietnam war. As my hon. Friend eloquently pointed out, there was a genuine disagreement in this country with the proposal to take military action against the Assad regime a few weeks ago. So far, although it is far too early to tell, if the objective of our Government and the American Government was, as stated, to stop chemical weapons attacks, as things are unfolding, we are in a better position at the moment to stop chemical weapons attacks than anyone might have dreamed possible.”
“Again, once America had entered the conflict, the outcome could not be in doubt, even though many months—indeed, several years—of desperate conflict had to ensue before victory was obtained. Scrolling forward rapidly into the post-war years, we see the occasions on which Britain backed the American initiative—unusually, for once, with the support of the United Nations, because the Russians at that time were not participating in the Security Council—in the Korean war; but there have been hiccups as well, and this is germane to the point that my hon. Friend the Member for Lichfield made about not reading too much into the vote on Syria and the divergence of policy between the two countries. If people forget everything else in my contribution, I hope that they will seek to remember this one point.”
“These were all methods of helping the British war effort while the United States itself was still not a belligerent. Less well known is the “Shoot at Sight” policy whereby the Americans undertook, if there were any interference on the high seas by Hitler’s U-boats, to engage them militarily if they sought to attack convoys going from the United States to the United Kingdom. In other words, the Americans did, given the limitations of their constitutional system, everything that they possibly could do to help Britain in its hour of need until such time as the political situation in the United States—because it was no easy decision for them—facilitated the entry of the United States into the war; and of course to that, the contribution of the Japanese in their treacherous attack at Pearl Harbor was decisive.”