Adviser on Ministerial Interests

Debate between David Linden and Alistair Carmichael

Tuesday 21st June 2022 Commons Chamber

[David Linden]

I respect the Paymaster General enormously but it will take a lot for him to reassure me about the Government’s role on ethics.

When I asked the Paymaster General earlier to define “in due course”, he was not able to say that the appointment would take place by the summer recess or the conference recess. We might—who knows—have a general election in October. I would not be surprised if the Government ended up not appointing an adviser. As they have said before, they are tired of experts. I think they see the role of an adviser as a hindrance, particularly at a time when they will almost certainly have to break international law, albeit in a “very specific and limited way” as the Government like to do in their legislation.

I find some of the contributions I have listened to in this debate a little jarring, with people talking about accountability and respecting the importance of democracy. Let us not forget that this Government have increasingly taken recently to appointing people who are essentially failed election candidates to the House of Lords.

Look at someone such as Malcolm Offord, now Lord Offord, who is now a junior Minister in the anti-Scotland Office. He has given money to the Conservative party, he has not had to have the inconvenience of going through an election and was appointed as a junior Minister to the Scotland Office. Or there is Ian Duncan, a former Tory candidate against my hon. Friend the Member for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart). He could not beat my hon. Friend in an election, but he got into the House of Lords anyway. Zac Goldsmith, a friend of the Prime Minister and his wife, who failed in the last election to be elected to this House is in the House of Lords as a Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Minister. When the Tories start to talk about accountability, we should be slightly aware of the context, because it is not a particularly good one.

I have one suggestion I want to pursue. The Government seem to think that the way out of this is talking about an office of the Prime Minister. That is a half-baked suggestion. I do not disagree with having an office of the Prime Minister, but if we are going to have one, they should have something akin to what they have in New Zealand. At the moment, the office of the Prime Minister is merely a rebuttal in a press release; it will create a new office with a new permanent secretary, but who will it be accountable to?

We in this place trust that the Prime Minister is accountable every now and again to the Liaison Committee, but we all know that the Liaison Committee, with the greatest of respect to my hon. Friend the Member for Perth and North Perthshire on the Front Bench and the hon. Member for Hazel Grove (Mr Wragg), is largely an opportunity for Select Committee Chairs to grandstand. If we are going to have an office of the Prime Minister, there must be a mechanism through which we can hold it to account. That is why I think the idea is half baked.

[Mr Carmichael]

In terms of accountability, does the hon. Gentleman agree that where an allegation of impropriety is made against a Minister and is investigated, as a matter of principle the outcome of that investigation, whatever it is, should be published?

[David Linden]

In short, yes I do.

The final point I want to make is that, while in many respects this is a very noble motion before the House and I will happily vote for it tonight, there must be a realisation in this place that with the current holder of the office of Prime Minister, politics has changed enormously, and we as Members of the House of Commons are going to have to get used to that. This is a Prime Minister who has defied all the norms of politics, who has now outlived Trump and may go even further.

I ask Members of this House to remember who the current Prime Minister is. I know I cannot refer to him by name, but on issues of racism he wrote:

“It is said that the Queen has come to love the Commonwealth, partly because it supplies her with regular cheering crowds of flag-waving piccaninnies”.

In 2018, he compared Muslim women to “bank robbers” and “letter boxes” and said he would ask a person with a niqab to remove it before speaking to him. He wrote that single mothers were to blame for producing a generation of,

“ill-raised, ignorant, aggressive and illegitimate children”.

In 2002 he said in a book:

“If gay marriage was OK…I saw no reason in principle why a union should not be consecrated between three men, as well as two men, or indeed three men and a dog.”

The point is that this Government can have all the advisers on ethics they like, but I am fairly sure that if another one is appointed, they will have to resign again. The issue here is not necessarily the role of an adviser for ethics; the issue is that we have a Prime Minister who has no ethics.

We find ourselves in a remarkable situation where, as the hon. Member for Brighton, Kemptown (Lloyd Russell-Moyle) just mentioned, a majority of people in this House do not have confidence in the Prime Minister. Remarkably, members of my party are told we cannot have a second referendum on independence, but for hon. Members on the Conservative Benches, the only opportunity they have to remove the Prime Minister is a second vote in a year’s time. That irony is lost on nobody.

Integrated Activity Fund: Transparency

Debate between David Linden and Alistair Carmichael

Thursday 22nd October 2020 Westminster Hall

[David Linden (Glasgow East) (SNP)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered transparency of the Integrated Activity Fund.

May I say from the outset that it is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Efford, and to see Members here for this Thursday afternoon debate? Many MPs from different parties have attempted to question the Government on this fund, only to be met with unclear and murky answers. This is a fund of up to £20 million each year to countries accused of human rights abuses, so the last thing the Government should be is unclear and murky.

I will raise several issues regarding the transparency of the fund, in the hope that the Government can finally provide some answers. We know that the fund is spent across the Gulf Co-operation Council states—Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Oman. However, the Government have failed to provide a breakdown of spending in each country. Ministers reason that this lack of transparency is because:

“Many of the projects and programme activities were delivered regionally, so it is not possible to provide a breakdown by beneficiary state.”

It seems clear to me that a solution would be to outline the projects that the IAF supports, then we could understand how the money is spent across the region.

However, when MPs have inquired into the projects that the fund supports, the Government continue to be vague:

“The Integrated Activity Fund supported a range of non-ODA programmes and projects across the Gulf. These included, but were not limited to, activities focusing on culture, healthcare, youth engagement, economic diversification and institutional capacity building.”

I am afraid that that is not clear enough. The House deserves to know exactly what projects the UK Government are funding across the region through the IAF.

[Mr Alistair Carmichael (Orkney and Shetland) (LD)]

The hon. Gentleman is setting up the debate nicely here, but may I suggest that it might be helpful to go back to first principles and ask ourselves whether, in the areas he has just outlined, the need for any reform within the Gulf Co-operation Council countries may not necessarily be rooted in lack of money?

[David Linden]

The right hon. Gentleman puts a good point on the record, and it is something I will attempt to develop later in my speech. In terms of first principles, he is perhaps right, and I am sure that when he speaks he will reaffirm that to the Minister.

Considering the accusations from human rights groups over the legitimacy of this fund, the Government should be obliged to publish the results of the risk assessment that they should obviously have undertaken. However, the Government will not even disclose to the House the beneficiaries or implementers of, or projects funded by, the IAF, giving Ministers and the public no idea how their money is being spent.

Members of this House and of the other House have repeatedly questioned the Government on the specifics of the Integrated Activity Fund. However, we have only received vague half-answers in response. I guess that begs the question: if the Government have nothing to hide, why will they not be completely transparent on the fund?

The question of transparency clearly links with a topic brought up by hon. Members across the House, that of human rights abuses in the gulf region. Hon. Members have brought up the fact that the UK Government funds projects in countries such as Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, where we know the death penalty, torture and political imprisonment take place. Indeed, the human rights situation in those countries is worsening; Saudi Arabia executed a record 184 people last year, while the indiscriminate Saudi-led bombing of Yemen is responsible for what the United Nations describes as the world’s worst man-made humanitarian catastrophe.

This is not the first time the Government have been criticised over their funding of projects in GCC states. A case in point is the controversial conflict, security and stability fund, the CSSF, which drew criticism from UK aid watchdogs for serious shortcomings in the way it operated. It was found to have been insufficiently rigorous in applying safeguards to prevent collaboration with foreign entities with suspect human rights records.

One project funded by the CSSF was the contentious security and justice programme in Bahrain. In its 2018 report, the Foreign Affairs Committee urged the Government to review the programme, particularly in light of the evidence that Bahraini prison staff and security personnel had been implicated in torture and extrajudicial killings.

That programme, which cost at least £6.5 million, caused the CSSF to come under parliamentary investigation for its lack of transparency. However, once the programme began to face scrutiny, it was simply transferred over to the Integrated Activity Fund. If the CSSF faced severe criticism from this House for its funding of the programme, then it is only natural that the IAF, which is arguably more opaque, should receive the same investigation.

The IAF has also come under further scrutiny for its links to the Bahrain Special Investigations Unit. Recent freedom of information requests obtained by the Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy revealed that in 2018, visits were made under the IAF from the College of Policing, the Independent Office for Police Conduct, and Merseyside’s professional standards department to meet counterparts at Bahrain’s Special Investigations Unit. Since those visits, Bahrain’s SIU has been criticised by the International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims as “critically flawed” and failing to meet,

“the minimum professional standards and minimum international legal standards”.

Bahraini judges and representatives from the Ministry of Interior visited the UK in 2018 and 2019 under the IAF. According to the Bahraini embassy in London, these visits were conducted to discuss,

“both the scope and implementation of alternative sentences in the UK”.

The FOI requests also indicate that no overseas justice and security assessment was conducted for the judges’ visit, violating the Government’s own human rights safeguarding policy.

Prior to a mass prisoner release to ease the severe overcrowding of Bahrain’s prisons following the outbreak of covid-19, evidence suggests that alternative sentencing legislation was discriminating against political prisoners, including Sheikh Mirza Al-Mahroos and human rights defender Ali Al-Hajee. Alongside revealing the other contentious programmes and activities that the IAF supports, the FOI requests further highlight that at least two programmes have been provided exclusively to Bahrain. This evidence shows that certain activities are, in fact, country specific, thus negating the FCDO’s claim that country-specific breakdowns are impossible, since activities are only covered regionally. In the light of that, I again urge the Government to provide a clear breakdown of the individual projects and programmes they fund in each of the countries that the IAF supports.

With a history of controversial projects and their insistence on being vague about the Integrated Activity Fund, the Government are not painting a particularly clear image of their support for the GCC region. Lord Scriven said of the IAF:

“I have never seen a situation where it started open and became more swiftly opaque as criticisms grew… the Government have become hypersensitive if not paranoid to the fact that the truth will be exposed”.

It is imperative that the Government are more transparent about the Integrated Activity Fund, including by releasing information on the specific projects that the fund supports, in what countries, and crucially, whether they comply with the human rights risk assessment. I look forward to the Minister, for whom I have the utmost respect as a personal friend, enlightening the Chamber this afternoon as he closes the debate on behalf of the Government.