G20 Summit

Geoffrey Robinson Excerpts

Monday 15th November 2010 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

My hon. Friend is right. We have to make this argument, because there is no doubt that a lot of people in our country look at a growing aid budget and think that that is money not well spent; they think that that money should be spent elsewhere. We have to make the argument that this is not just a moral argument about relieving poverty in the poorest parts of the world; it is also about avoiding conflict and about investing money upstream so that we do not end up with the Afghanistans and other broken countries. When we look at places such as Yemen and Somalia, it is quite clear that we need to have active aid programmes to try to help stitch those countries back together before we reach more serious problems.

[Mr Geoffrey Robinson (Coventry North West) (Lab)]

The House will have admired the Prime Minister’s evasive action on the issue of Ireland. He must be aware that it was the very strong view of the previous Government that we should not go into the euro and we were successful in that respect. What lessons, apart from that, can he now draw from the Irish situation? The Irish have been exemplary in every respect in pursuing the course that he has embarked on, and they have ended up in the mess they are in at the moment.

[The Prime Minister]

I do not want to make life difficult for the Irish at a time when they are trying to take difficult decisions about their own economy. However, they had a consumer boom, a property boom and badly regulated banks—some of the mistakes made by the Government of whom the hon. Gentleman was briefly a member—and they added to that the issue of euro membership. I always think that the great lesson from the exchange rate mechanism is that the euro is the exchange rate mechanism without an exit, and that is the problem.

Treatment of Detainees

Geoffrey Robinson Excerpts

Tuesday 6th July 2010 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

That is a very good question. The answer is that if it is safe to do so, yes of course. This is not some political witch hunt to get at Ministers from a previous Government; that is not what this is about. Likewise, it is not about trying to cover up bad things that might have happened. It is about trying to get to the bottom of what happened, to explain the context and to get the information out there. As the Minister for the intelligence services, however, I have to have regard to what it is safe to release, and that is a responsibility that I have to take very seriously.

[Mr Geoffrey Robinson (Coventry North West) (Lab)]

Is the Prime Minister aware, from the general tenor of the questions this afternoon, that his statement is very welcome throughout the House? He is to be commended for it. Can he confirm that the 46 documents originating from the CIA—about which there has been a lot of discussion—will be made available not only to the inquiry but perhaps more widely as well?

[The Prime Minister]

The point is that the inquiry can follow the evidence wherever it leads—but let me be clear that it is not an inquiry into what the US authorities have done. It is an inquiry into what UK personnel may or may not have done. It is important that we get that straight. The stain, if you like, on the British situation is the allegations of complicity, and of what our personnel might have witnessed or in some way been complicit in. That is what we have to deal with. We are not trying to have some great inquiry into the practices and procedures of other intelligence services; that is not what the inquiry is about.

G8 and G20 Summits

Geoffrey Robinson Excerpts

Monday 28th June 2010 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

Let me try to answer both those questions briefly. The way to judge progress in Afghanistan is in terms of the basic level of security, stability and governance. So in Helmand, for instance, as we see districts that are under good provincial governors, with lead Afghan control over security, that is the time when we can judge that the job is getting done, and there is some prospect of some of that happening this year. As for talking to Taliban, as the right hon. and learned Gentleman puts it, a process of reconciliation and reintegration is taking place, where Taliban who are prepared to stop fighting and accept the basic tenets of the Afghan constitution can be reintegrated back into society. That should happen. That political track, which runs alongside the training of the Afghan army and the military surge, is vital, and we need to push further and faster on it.

[Mr Geoffrey Robinson (Coventry North West) (Lab)]

May I push the Prime Minister slightly harder on the issue of Afghanistan and talking to the Taliban? It is true, as he says, that those who want to lay down their arms can be welcomed back, but there may be many who are not, but who will nevertheless be required to do so, in the event of a political situation being arrived at, which all of us in this House know is the only eventual outcome for Afghanistan. There is a limited amount that the Prime Minister can say, but it would be good if he could reassure the House that, come the right moment and in the right way, the British Government will indicate their willingness to talk?

[The Prime Minister]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for the way in which he put his question. This is one of those things that it is better to get on and deal with, rather than endlessly theorising about it. There is a huge difference between that part of the insurgency that is linked to al-Qaeda and is extremist in its ideology, and what has become in some parts of Afghanistan an insurgency based on the way in which particular tribes have been dealt with or on particular local issues. There is a difference between the two, and we need to bear that in mind in this important political track that we have embarked on.