Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Alex Chalk and Patrick Grady(11 months, 3 weeks ago)
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The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (Alex Chalk)
The Illegal Migration Bill will break the business model of ruthless people-smuggling gangs, deter migrants from making dangerous channel crossings, and restore fairness to our asylum system. The Bill provides a robust but fair legal framework to remove illegal migrants swiftly while ensuring the proper opportunity to appeal remains. I am working closely with colleagues on the implementation of the Bill.
Patrick Grady
Access to justice is a basic human right, and judicial review is a particularly vital safeguard against unlawful state decision making, so why are the Government blocking the opportunities for judicial review in the Illegal Migration Bill? Does that not reflect a Government who are perhaps not so confident about the actual legality of the Bill?
Alex Chalk
No, absolutely not. Access to justice is at the heart of the Bill, and indeed we make sure that where it is necessary, people can have the legal advice to make those points. But the hon. Gentleman’s question is a little rich in circumstances where the SNP seems hellbent on getting rid of jury trials in some of the most significant cases. We are absolutely clear that juries are the lamp of our liberty. We will not be getting rid of them—why is the hon. Gentleman so keen to do so?
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Alex Chalk and Patrick Grady(1 year, 6 months ago)
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The Minister for Defence Procurement (Alex Chalk)
I reassure my hon. Friend that Greater Lincolnshire continues to be a major investment hub for the MOD and the wider defence industry. RAF Waddington is one of the RAF’s busiest locations and will remain a base for the foreseeable future. I very much welcome the creation this year of the Greater Lincolnshire Defence and Security Network.
Patrick Grady (Glasgow North) (Ind)
Do the Government recognise that while the practice of double-counting spending towards the targets for overseas development assistance and for NATO defence might be a neat trick, it is a false economy?
Official Development Assistance Target
Debate between Alex Chalk and Patrick Grady(4 years, 3 months ago)
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Patrick Grady
Absolutely—the SNP, of course, promotes independence for all kinds of causes. This is at the heart of the debate. It was raised by the Labour Front-Bench spokesperson in his conclusion in today’s debate on the Queen’s Speech, it was raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Stirling (Alyn Smith), and it has been raised by Members across the House, and I will come back to it as well. I hope the Minister will take this chance to answer it. The hon. Member for Enfield, Southgate (Bambos Charalambous) is absolutely right to raise the international examples, because there has been regression elsewhere in the world. The UK is supposed to pride itself on its global leadership, so let us see if that is to continue.
Alex Chalk (Cheltenham) (Con)
The hon. Gentleman is making a passionate and compelling speech in favour of overseas development. Does he agree that we are much better able to have the kind of impact internationally that he talks about when we are one United Kingdom than we would if we were fragmented into four different nations?
Patrick Grady
I will be happy to return to that, but I would point out that 0.7% is a proportion of gross national income, so Scotland, under a Barnett formula or whatever, as an independent country, would continue to spend its equivalent proportion or possibly more.
We have yet another ministerial team in DFID. I welcome all those Ministers to their posts, especially those who have arrived via the Government Whips Office, but they should know that the trend away from the aid target for DFID spending is something that many of us have been keeping an eye on for many years, and it is a cause for concern. As my hon. Friend the Member for Stirling pointed out earlier, over 27% of ODA funds are now spent by Departments other than DFID, including the Home Office and the Ministry of Defence. I have been particularly concerned about the increasing amount of spending that is effectively being double-counted, towards both the 0.7% aid target and the NATO defence spending target of 2% of gross national income. I know that Ministers will say that they do not mark their own homework and that it cannot be helped if some spending meets both measurements, but every effort should be made to ensure that the two targets are reached with distinct spending and that any overlap just happens to be a bonus.
The National Audit Office concluded in June 2019 that aid spending outside DFID was not transparent enough. Those concerns can only be compounded by the growing rumour and speculation in the press and elsewhere about the future of the Department and the Government’s commitment to the ODA target. The Tory manifesto in this election barely mentioned international development and made no reference to the sustainable development goals. All the other main parties committed to maintaining DFID as a stand-alone Department, but the Tory manifesto was silent on that. The Minister now has an important opportunity to clarify, on the record, the Government’s position and intentions. Members have been asking about this all day, and we do not want to hear a “wait and see” response. He has seen my early-day motion about this issue and he knew perfectly well what the subject of this debate would be from the title, so here goes.
Can the Minister give the House a categorical assurance that the Government will spend 0.7% of gross national income on official development assistance each year for the lifetime of this Parliament? To do anything else would jeopardise over 20 years of cross-party consensus and risk undermining any pretence to global leadership on these issues. Can he confirm that the Government will not seek to change, or initiate changes to, pre-existing international definitions of official development assistance? If the OECD definition were to change, that should be done on the basis of an evidential need and using a consensus-based approach. At the very least, any changes would need to be agreed through a genuinely participative, consultative, global process. It would defeat the entire purpose of meeting the target if the definition of aid were to be arbitrarily or unilaterally changed, especially if it allowed aid to be used for diplomacy, military or corporate commercial purposes.
Can the Minister outline what discussions, if any, have taken place within Government about the continued existence of DFID as a dedicated, stand-alone Department? What is his response to newspaper reports that DFID might be retained as a Department, but that its Secretary of State would also be the Foreign Secretary? He must surely accept that if that were to happen, it would be a merger of the FCO and DFID in all but name. If DFID is to remain both effective and accountable, it must have its own dedicated Secretary of State, who can champion its cause in the Cabinet and answer questions on the Floor of this House.
Have any such discussions about the future of the Department been part of preparations for the Government’s proposed integrated security, defence and foreign policy review? As the hon. Member for Liverpool, Walton asked earlier from the Labour Front Bench, what is the timetable for the review? Will it be subject to consultation, and what other opportunities will there be for stakeholders to contribute? What is the Minister’s response to press reports that DFID country reps will be asked to report to local UK ambassadors? Does he realise that this risks politicising DFID programmes in developing countries?
Aid should be delivered without fear or favour. One of the great achievements of DFID and the global aid community since the 1990s has been the move away from conditionality of aid and the understanding that progress towards the global goals should be separated from any specific relationship issues with country Governments. We cannot allow that to slide backwards. If the Minister sees a case for integrating DFID functions with embassies, can he have a word with his colleagues at the Home Office, who are busy stripping visa functions out of embassies, privatising them and causing chaos in their wake? Either embassies are hubs for the entirety of the UK’s presence in a country or they are not.
What reassurances can the Minister give to DFID staff about the size of the workforce and the Government’s commitment to retaining their expertise, especially, but not only, for those based in Scotland?
Chagos Islands: UN General Assembly Resolution
Debate between Alex Chalk and Patrick Grady(4 years, 10 months ago)
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Patrick Grady
Speaking as a member of a self-determination movement, I wholeheartedly agree. I had the huge privilege of meeting Benny Wenda from the West Papua campaign recently. The SNP has a long history of solidarity with that cause. These are not difficult problems for the Government to solve. I will come on to why there are some good reasons why they should do so.
The UN handed down that resolution in the context of an advisory opinion issued by the International Court of Justice on 25 February, which reached exactly the same conclusions. It is a comprehensive, definitive statement made under the due process of the international rules-based order. The UK Government, who are a permanent member of the UN Security Council, self-define as a soft-power superpower, believe that Brexit will lead to a glorious new era of empire 2.0, have invested millions of pounds in a global branding exercise called “Britain is GREAT”, and repeatedly demand that any number of other countries around the world comply with decisions of the United Nations, have none the less chosen to reject the resolution pretty much outright. They have left themselves in a state of diplomatic humiliation and international isolation. The five other countries that supported the Government at the UN were the Maldives and Hungary, Australia and Israel—neither of which are without critics of their own human rights records—and the United States of America, which is led by a man who is basically an international laughing stock. It is pretty damning stuff.
Whenever any of us has questions about whether blindly ignoring the advisory opinion of the ICJ and 116 other members of the UN General Assembly is a good idea for a country that is busy trying to extract itself from the biggest and most successful economic, social and political Union in history, the Government and the Minister simply double down. They say that Chagos has been under continuous British sovereignty since 1814 and has never been part of the Republic of Mauritius, but that ignores the fact that the islands were a dependency of Mauritius when it was administered first by the French and then as a British colony until 1965, when it was detached from Mauritius as a precondition of independence, the declaration of which was drafted by UK lawyers in 1968. It ignores the ICJ’s findings that the colony, by definition, could not freely agree to detachment as part of its territory prior to independence.
Alex Chalk (Cheltenham) (Con)
It is important to note that the judgment, so to speak, that came out of the ICJ was an advisory opinion, not a binding judgment. It is very important that we do not give the impression in this Chamber that it was more than it in fact was. Is the hon. Gentleman not overstating the case somewhat?
Patrick Grady
It is a very powerful statement that was made by a very significant number of countries, and it has left the United Kingdom isolated diplomatically.
The Government say that the UK needs to retain the Chagos islands in order to support the US military presence on Diego Garcia—as if supporting a base for weapons of mass destruction, which has helped facilitate extraordinary rendition, should somehow help us sleep more easily at night. However, the existence of the base is not dependent on British sovereignty, and it is only on the largest of the 55 islands. The rest remain uninhabited as a result of the forced deportation of the community in the ’60s and ’70s. It would be perfectly possible to settle there.