Britain in the World

Boris Johnson Excerpts

Monday 1st June 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hammond]

I will make some progress, but I will come back to the hon. Gentleman because he has been very persistent.

When it comes to tackling Islamist extremism and its consequences, we will need a comprehensive approach, deploying every one of the tools available to us in a generational struggle against an evil but amorphous foe. As the brutal attacks in the past year by Islamist terrorists in Tunisia, Belgium, France, Australia, Canada and elsewhere have demonstrated, this is not just about Iraq and Syria; instability and extremism in one part of the world can end up costing innocent lives on the other side of the globe.

Established groups such as ISIL and al-Qaeda have an international reach and pose a direct threat to the safety of British citizens and those of our allies. Newer extremist groups aspire to match them. They threaten stability in regions critical to our prosperity and our security, and the brutality and suffering they inflict on communities in the areas they currently control have led to millions of people being forced to flee from their homes in search of safety.

That is why the 60-nation international coalition against ISIL, in which the UK plays a leading role, is developing a comprehensive response across five mutually reinforcing lines of effort: supporting military operations and training; stopping the flow of foreign fighters; cutting off ISIL’s funding; providing humanitarian relief to those displaced by ISIL’s advance; and delegitimising ISIL and its messaging. We will remain at the forefront of the battle to degrade and ultimately destroy Islamist extremism in the middle east and Africa, and to stop it spreading and undermining democracy in south-east Asia, especially in Indonesia, the largest country in the Islamic world.

[Boris Johnson (Uxbridge and South Ruislip) (Con)]

My right hon. Friend is speaking very well about everything Britain can do to prevent ISIL from killing people in Syria and the middle east. What can we do to prevent the appalling tragedy that might befall the great ruins—the great archaeological site, I should say—in Palmyra? Is there any hope he can offer?

[Mr Hammond]

I know that my hon. Friend is extremely concerned about this issue, but he will know that ISIL, for what it is worth, has given some limited assurances about its intentions with regard to the site. The problem is that the principal instrument the coalition has to deploy is air power, and he can well understand the difficulty in deploying air power to protect historical sites—that does not make sense. I am afraid that the answer lies in the relentless pursuit of the campaign against ISIL: pushing them back on the ground, pushing them back wherever they present themselves.

--- Later in debate ---

[Hilary Benn]

Let me gently say to the hon. Gentleman that the convention was part of Churchill’s legacy and that we should be proud of the part Britain played in asserting the primacy of human rights—indeed out of the ashes of that terrible conflict that was the second world war. It is one of the reasons why a number of voices now say that Britain is not pulling its weight.

It cannot have been much fun for the Foreign Secretary to get his press cuttings delivered over the last few months, when General Sir Richard Shirreff, the former NATO commander, told The Times that the Prime Minister was

“a bit player”, a “foreign policy irrelevance” and that

“Nobody is taking any notice of him”,

when The Economist described “Little Britain” as

“a shrinking actor on the global stage”,

and the Washington Post ran a piece headed “Britain resigns as a world power”. In fairness to the Prime Minister, he has been a little distracted by the problems in his own party over the European Union.

[Boris Johnson]

I may have missed something. Could the right hon. Gentleman tell us whether he has changed his mind about having a referendum on the European Union, and if so why, and when he did so? What reforms does he hope to achieve in Europe?

[Hilary Benn]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for that question, and if he will bear with me for a just a moment longer, I shall address exactly the points he has raised.

The Prime Minister might temporarily have stopped his Back Benchers banging on about Europe, but I fear that many of them will be a bit disappointed when they discover that the Prime Minister is not the Eurosceptic they wish he was.

To answer the question of the hon. Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Boris Johnson), as my right hon. and learned Friend the Leader of the Opposition made clear in the opening of this Queen’s Speech debate, we will support the European Union Referendum Bill next week. [Interruption.] Well, circumstances have changed. There has been a general election and we listened to what people said on the doorsteps. [Interruption.] Before the hon. Gentleman gets too excited, he should reflect on the time when the Prime Minister and the former Foreign Secretary were bitterly opposed to holding a referendum—they, too, changed their minds, did they not? The issue now is what is the Government’s strategy for the renegotiation, when will the referendum be held, and who is going to make the argument for Britain remaining part of the European Union?

I listened very carefully to what the Foreign Secretary had to say just now about renegotiation, and I hope he will forgive me if I say he was a little hazy on the detail, especially given that he told the “Today” programme last week that we have

“a very clear set of requirements”.

It would be very nice if he shared them with the House.

On treaty change, the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary seem to have been in different places at times. Shortly after the general election, the No. 10 spokesperson briefed the newspapers to the effect that the Prime Minister was committed to securing treaty change. A few days later, however, the Foreign Secretary told the Financial Times:

“It does not mean we need treaty change for the politics”.

Which is it? The Foreign Secretary also told the “Today” programme last week:

“if we are not able to deliver on these big areas of concern that the British people have, we will not win the referendum when it comes.”

Could the Foreign Secretary clarify, for the House’s benefit, that when he said

“we will not win the referendum”,

it meant that he would, after all, be campaigning for a yes vote when the referendum comes, notwithstanding the contrary impression he has given in recent years?

--- Later in debate ---

[Boris Johnson (Uxbridge and South Ruislip) (Con)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for St Helens North (Conor McGinn) on one of a series of fantastic maiden speeches that we have heard this evening. I stress that mine is not a maiden speech—I have been specifically instructed by Mr Speaker that whatever maiden status I may once have possessed has long since passed away—but it gives me an opportunity to pay tribute to my great predecessor in the office of Member of Parliament for Uxbridge and South Ruislip, Sir John Randall.

John Randall was one of the kindest and wisest people in this place, and one of the very few Conservatives to forecast with complete accuracy what would go wrong with the Iraq war. Members may recall that he stepped down from the Front Bench before the invasion, with absolutely no self-advertisement, and never drew any attention to the fact that he had got it so thumpingly right. It is, incidentally, a measure of his popularity in Uxbridge that, at a recent electoral hustings there, virtually every candidate stood up to claim that he or she was the true heir of John Randall. “I am John Randall,” they kept saying, meaning them rather than me. I have to accept that I am not John Randall, but I will do my best to emulate him in his service to the constituency, and to London more broadly.

We are seeing fantastic success in this city. I am delighted to say that, as Hansard will confirm, during my final appearance in the House seven years ago I pointed out to the then Prime Minister that I had just banned alcohol on public transport. I was interrupted by the Speaker, and ordered to sit down. I do not know what objection he had to our policy. I now want to point out that, as a result of that policy, crime on London transport has fallen by 50%. Crime on buses has fallen by 50%, and we now have the safest tube network anywhere in Europe. As a result of the continual improvements we are seeing in our city we have the most dynamic urban economy anywhere in Europe—and I am grateful for the many excellent measures in the Queen’s Speech, which I will rapidly summarise as this 12-minute oration has been compressed to four.

I am delighted that we will see the stopping of the madness of a transport strike being triggered by a tiny minority—something City Hall has long advocated—and devolution to the great economic powerhouses of the cities of England. Fiscal devolution will enable us to build Crossrail 2 and many other wonderful projects—many hundreds of thousands. I also approve, by the way, of the decision to allow people to buy their own housing association homes, provided it leads to the rapid construction of more homes—low-cost homes—and it keeps the revenue raised for investment in housing in London.

[Nadhim Zahawi]

Can my hon. Friend tell us how many houses he has built in London during his mayoralty?

[Boris Johnson]

I am delighted that my hon. Friend reminds me that under this mayoralty, and indeed under this Government, we built far more homes than Labour did in 13 years. We have built a record number of affordable homes, and we will go on until May 2016 to build a record 100,000 affordable homes over eight years.

Thanks to the hard and successful work of the Conservative-led Government over the last four years, we have a strong, dynamic, successful economy, but the most exciting thing for me, as someone who came into politics more than 20 years ago, is that we now have a Tory-majority Government with a clear mandate to seek change, and therefore a Government in the most powerful position in our lifetimes to deliver reform and improvement in Europe. We can win that argument by being relentlessly positive and by making it clear that what we are advocating is in the interests not simply of Britain but of the entire European Union.

I congratulate the Prime Minister on the élan and success with which he has begun his pan-European schmoozathon in the chancelleries of Europe. I believe his efforts will be crowned with success, but I would remind him of something that I think all of us would want to remind him, our negotiators, the Foreign Secretary and everybody else: if you are going to go into a difficult international negotiation, you have to be prepared to walk away if you do not get the result you want.

[Dr Julian Lewis]

I really feel that the next thought my hon. Friend is about to express deserves an extra minute in which to express it.

[Boris Johnson]

I am obliged, because it is absolutely right that if we do not get a deal that is in the interests of this country or of Europe we should be prepared to strike out and forge an alternative future that could be just as glorious and just as prosperous, with a free-trading arrangement.

I notice that, in the course of trying to settle this argument over the last few days, assorted speakers have invoked the memory of Winston Churchill in one way or another. Churchill is absolutely useless on this subject. He is biblical in this matter; we can find a text to justify almost any proposition about our relations with Europe that we choose, but one thing he believed in passionately was in Parliament as the expression of the will of the British people, and he would want to see that democratic principle upheld today.

If in the course of those negotiations the Prime Minister wants to invite any of our partners to see the contribution of this country to the prosperity and unity of modern Europe, he could do no better than take them to Uxbridge, where it is now possible to view the amazing bunker that housed Fighter Command No. 11 group operations room, one of the most moving and atmospheric places in this country.