British Council Contractors in Afghanistan

Debate between John Baron and Julian Lewis

Wednesday 11th January 2023 Westminster Hall

[Mr Baron]

I completely agree with my hon. Friend. We asked these people to step up to the plate and are looking away when it is our turn to do so. That cannot be right and does not create a good impression of our country’s approach to such matters on the international stage.

Last summer, after activity from the British Council all-party group in particular—I thank the APPG and its members for being so hardy in this cause—the Government opened an application window for the contractors to apply for a place on the ACRS. The British Council worked at pace with the FCDO, as the Minister will know, to winnow out genuine applicants. By September, around half had heard that they had a place on the scheme, pending security checks, but they have heard nothing since. Certainly, that was the case up to Christmas. The other half of applicants—around 100—had simply heard nothing at all. Their papers were stuck in a bureaucratic mishmash in Whitehall. Following pressure from the British Council all-party group in particular and from others, I understand that over the Christmas recess around half of the contractors had their ACRS applications acknowledged and granted, and I look forward to hearing whether the Minister can confirm that.

Barriers remain. People will apparently require the necessary ID and travel documents to leave Afghanistan. They left their homes at short notice and are in fear of their lives, moving from one safehouse to another, and I am sure the Minister will be sympathetic to the case that they might not have all their paperwork. The idea of applying to the Taliban for passports is, as I am sure the Minister will realise, just not feasible. Meanwhile, new-born children may have arrived, bringing further complication for paperwork.

In the interest of brevity, knowing that others might want to contribute to this very brief debate and wanting to allow the Minister plenty of time to respond and take interventions if necessary, I have four questions for the Minister. I hope he will take note of them and answer them in turn. First, am I right to understand that around half the contractors have been given the go-ahead? It is a simple yes or no.

Secondly, have they been told they can make for the border? If so, I ask the Minister what he and the wider ministerial team at the FCDO are doing to encourage Governments in third countries to offer a greater degree of flexibility on paperwork for those seeking to cross the border out of Afghanistan. Such arrangements were previously agreed with the Government of Pakistan, which allowed individuals under the predecessor Afghan relocations and assistance policy scheme to cross the border without ID if their names were on a list approved by the British Government. Is it going to be as simple as that?

Thirdly, I understand that around half of contractors are yet to hear anything. By when can they expect to be contacted? It is totally unacceptable, as Members have already heard and will continue to hear. It is totally unacceptable—a view widely held in the House—that those people have had to hold on and wait for so long. It is just inhumane.

Finally, may I make a plea to the Minister? In my various deliberations, I have heard some unedifying, if not distasteful, talk of quotas. Will he ensure that quotas do not prevent those who worked for Britain and their families seeking safety in the UK? After all, there was no talk of quotas when we asked for volunteers. There is no talk of quotas when it comes to the extent of these people’s bravery in stepping up to the plate when we needed them. We should therefore not be talking about quotas when it is our turn to stand by them.

In conclusion, although I do not doubt Government or the Minister’s good intentions—it is often an issue of cock-up rather than conspiracy—the sad fact is that after the scheme was introduced, for the whole year of 2022, not one person was relocated. I will not accept any of the talk I have heard previously of many hundreds or thousands being helped. That is disinformation. People who got out under Operation Pitting have been retrospectively shoehorned into various schemes. I hope the Minister will not recite those figures to me. The sad fact is that during 2022 nobody has been relocated under the scheme.

As we reach the first anniversary of the ACRS, I urge the Government finally to get all those contractors and their families to safety. Recent talk in certain circles of the number of Taliban being killed has not helped them at all. After all, the ACRS was a flagship scheme announced with great fanfare, but nobody has yet been relocated. The litmus test of the success of the scheme is how many people have been relocated over the course of the past year, and that figure is a big fat zero. Now is the time to put that right.

[Sir Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way so near to the end of his speech. I just wanted to remind Members that this is very similar to what happened with Afghan interpreters, where there was a redundancy scheme—this was before the fall of Kabul—and an intimidation scheme. While considerable numbers were brought out under the redundancy scheme, none was brought out under the intimidation scheme, at least until the fifth report of the Defence Committee of 2017 to 2019, which was published in May 2018 and recommended a more generous approach. As the Minister was a member of the Defence Committee that drew up that report, I am sure he will be sympathetic to a request for a meeting to discuss all these matters—as has already been offered by his ministerial colleague, my right hon. Friend the Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell).

[Mr Baron]

I thank my right hon. Friend for that intervention. I completely agree: there are many similarities, and one would have thought that we would have learned the lessons by now.

Having finished my address, I look forward to the Minister answering those four specific questions.

Defence Supplementary Estimate 2021-22

Debate between John Baron and Julian Lewis

Wednesday 9th March 2022 Commons Chamber

[Dr Lewis]

I quite agree with both my right hon. Friend the Member for Beckenham (Bob Stewart) and my hon. Friend.

Bearing in mind your advice, Madam Deputy Speaker, I will conclude with one point about the budget itself. During the period in which I chaired the Defence Committee, we produced two reports—one in 2016 called “Shifting the goalposts?” and the other an update to that report in 2019—with the purpose of setting very firmly on the record what the proportion of GDP spent on defence had been historically on a like-for-like basis. It is a fact that, in the aftermath of the Korean war, defence spending as a proportion of GDP at one point was as high as 7%. In about 1963, it crossed over with spending on welfare at 6%. That was all a long time ago, but as recently as the 1980s the spending on health, education and defence was roughly the same at just over 4% of GDP.

[Mr John Baron (Basildon and Billericay) (Con)]

My right hon. Friend, I and probably everybody present in the Chamber have been calling since we have been Members of Parliament for much higher defence spending. I think that is accepted. However, does he agree with me that once that higher level of spending is determined, we should not necessarily link it to GDP, because economies can go up and down? There have to be real-terms increases once that higher figure is decided, otherwise the armed forces will not know where they are and it will be difficult to plan.

[Dr Lewis]

I do agree with that point; using GDP percentages has always been only a very rough and ready guide.

What was absolutely shocking was the way in which, given that even within half a dozen years of the downfall of the Berlin wall—as late as 1993-94—we were still spending 3.1% on the old method of calculation and 3.6% on the new method of calculation, whereby the MOD is allowed to include certain things we never used to include, it then became an argument as to whether we would even manage to achieve 2% of GDP. Our expectations have been managed down so far that when, even in recent times, a number of us have called for 3% to be a target, it was regarded as being completely out of reach. It should not be out of reach. The sort of effort we put into defending this country is the most important investment we can make, so 3% of GDP should now be seen not as a target or as a minimum, but as a stepping stone on the way to a realistic investment to meet the threat that never really went away, the reality of which in Ukraine has now been proclaimed for all the world to see.

Report of the Iraq Inquiry

Debate between John Baron and Julian Lewis

Thursday 14th July 2016 Commons Chamber

[Dr Lewis]

I agree with a great deal of what the right hon. Gentleman has just said. Although it is not a matter of primary concern to us now, the fact is that Saddam Hussein was the author of his own misfortune. We must remember that, apart from being a brutal dictator, Saddam Hussein had invaded and occupied Kuwait in 1990. He chose to try to convince his own people that he had not given up these weapons, when either he had given them up or, as the right hon. Gentleman said and as rumours persist to this day, he had spirited them away, possibly to Syria. However, although I see a degree of agreement with me from those on the Labour Benches over this issue, they may find it a little harder to accept the next point that I wish to make.

[Mr John Baron (Basildon and Billericay) (Con)]

I have great respect for my right hon. Friend, as he will know. However, I suggest that, on this issue, it was not just about intelligence sourcing from here. The United Nations inspectors at the time were pleading for more time because they could not find the WMDs upon which premise we were going to war. We should have listened to them as well. Ultimately, the reason they could not find the WMDs is that they did not exist.

[Dr Lewis]

Yes, but the problem that the inspectors and we would always have faced was summed up by something that was said at the Hutton inquiry into the death of Dr David Kelly. I was going to quote this later, but I shall do so now. On 21 August 2003, I attended the Hutton inquiry. In the course of giving evidence, Nicolas Rufford, a journalist, made a statement about a telephone conversation that he had had with Dr David Kelly in June 2003. Dr Kelly was, of course, a weapons expert, and knew all about the difficulties of detecting weapons stockpiles if they were hidden. In the course of that telephone conversation, Dr Kelly said to Mr Rufford that

“it was very easy to hide weapons of mass destruction because you simply had to dig a hole in the desert, put them inside, cover them with a tarpaulin, cover them with sand and then they would be almost impossible to discover”.

So the question that we come back to once again is: if Tony Blair had come to this House and more honestly highlighted the question marks against the reliability of the intelligence, would he be as excoriated today as he has been? Let me be counterfactual for a moment. Let us suppose that some stocks of anthrax had been discovered and there had been a secret cache. Would we still be saying that the people who took the decision in 2003, on the basis of what clearly was an honest belief that Saddam Hussein might have deadly stocks of anthrax, were wrong? I have no hesitation in saying that although the Government may have exaggerated—and probably did exaggerate—the strength of the evidence they had, I believe that they genuinely expected to find stocks of these weapons.

Parliamentary Sovereignty and EU Renegotiations

Debate between John Baron and Julian Lewis

Thursday 4th February 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Baron]

Let me make a little progress, and then I will take further interventions. I am also conscious of the time.

Let us be clear about the so-called “red card”. We appear to have a system that has more holes in it than a Swiss cheese—so much so that it is more like a lottery ticket that has been through the wash. The question is: is it valid? The idea is that we club together and form a majority with other national Parliaments to stop unwanted EU taxes and laws, but that would not enable our Parliament, by itself, to reject anything that it did not want. This would be an extension of the ineffectual “yellow card'” system currently in operation, but with an even higher threshold.

Lord Hague once referred in this Chamber to the system then in operation, which was similar to what is now being proposed:

“Given the difficulty of Oppositions winning a vote in their Parliaments, the odds against doing so in 14 countries around Europe with different parliamentary recesses—lasting up to 10 weeks in our own case—are such that even if the European Commission proposed the slaughter of the first-born it would be difficult to achieve such a remarkable conjunction of parliamentary votes.”—[Official Report, 21 January 2008; Vol. 470, c. 1262.]

The “lottery ticket” system will not work. It would be like a football referee getting out his fraction of a red card, only then to consult with 14 other officials before deciding what to do, by which time the game is over. If we are serious about regaining control of our borders and fisheries, and about having the ability to set our own trade deals and the power to set our own business regulation, sovereignty must be restored to Parliament. It is quite simple. Everything else is a cop-out, a sell-out, a lottery ticket fraud. Let us be honest about the washed-out lottery ticket.

[Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

I am glad that I did not interrupt my hon. Friend in the midst of that wonderful metaphor. One of the real problems with the mentality of those who subscribe to the EU project is that instead of being honest enough to say “no” to those of us who want our sovereignty back, they put forward devious and deceptive and pretences to say yes, when in reality they know it means no.

[Mr Baron]

I can only agree with my right hon. Friend. Having said that, the Minister for Europe is nothing but a courteous and able Minister, and I am delighted that he is in his place. I would not want him to be under the illusion that we are suggesting that of him, but there has been a tendency to act out a charade, when actually we have been on the conveyor belt of ever closer union. We need greater honesty in this debate.

Ukraine, Middle East, North Africa and Security

Debate between John Baron and Julian Lewis

Wednesday 10th September 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Baron]

I agree. Technically, the motion was about that, but there was also a push last year by the Government to arm rebels fighting Assad. However, because it would have been impossible to track and trace those arms, some of them would have ended up, inadvertently, in the hands of the very extremists we are now taking on in northern Iraq—a bitter irony if ever there was one.

[Dr Julian Lewis]

It was precisely for that reason that my hon. Friend and I made common cause against the folly of that intervention. On Afghanistan, does our policy not tend to be too reactive to the last thing that happened? It was said that as soon as the Soviets left, the west left Afghanistan to stew in its own juices. It was to prevent that from happening again that the west made the bad mistake, as it turned out, of engaging in nation building.

[Mr Baron]

I pay tribute to the work of my hon. Friend and others on both sides of the House in asking those difficult questions a year ago. We were right to do that. He is absolutely right about Afghanistan as well.

The litany of errors does not stop with Afghanistan. We now have the Libyan Government meeting on a Greek ferry off Tobruk; there is civil war; the number of civilian casualties is shooting up; and we have not got a proper policy. I certainly do not think our intervention helped the situation. We have now discussed Syria, and it is clear that the Government’s intentions to arm the rebels were misplaced, given that it would have been impossible to track and trace the arms. Our bigger issue is now taking on in Iraq some of the rebels who confronted Assad.

It is right to be cautious and to ask questions, and it is right that the bar has been set higher. I am pleased that Ministers realise the difference between air strikes in Iraq, which many of us could support, provided certain preconditions were in place, including a request from the Baghdad Government, and air strikes in Syria, which would be a much higher risk policy, not only because of Russian-built air defences, but because of the legalities and the fact that a common feature of the Syrian civil war has been the extremist groups lurking in the shadows and morphing into each other—al-Nusra, linked to al-Qaeda, for example—and would be difficult to say who might take ISIS’s place in Syria.

I welcome the caution. At the end of the day, the politics in Iraq must succeed. The elephant in the room is the Iraqi army. It has to be ground forces that defeat ISIS—air strikes alone will not succeed—but they must not be western. The symbolism of the west defeating this caliphate would be too great. The Iraqi army is the elephant in the room, but the politics must come through and succeed. What fomented the presence of ISIS was the very sectarian politics pursued by Maliki, the predecessor of the current Government. We must have more inclusive politics in Iraq, but at the same time we have to ensure that the army drives out ISIS.

Armed Forces

Debate between John Baron and Julian Lewis

Tuesday 25th June 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr John Baron (Basildon and Billericay) (Con)]

We can disagree with nothing in the motion, but without wishing to break the consensual mood of the House, I think that this is too good an opportunity not to ask at least some questions of Ministers, in the hope that they will at least reflect on them and perhaps return later.

I am concerned, as are a number of Members on these Benches, that by keeping on cutting defence expenditure, we risk creating imbalances on a variety of fronts. Can it be right, for example, that the budgets of Departments dealing with health, welfare and international aid are being protected, if not expanded, as a percentage of Government expenditure? That puts disproportionate pressure on other Departments, such as Defence, when trying to save costs. I also wonder whether imbalances are being created in regard to our transatlantic relationship. Our defence capability is one of the key anchors of that relationship, but it is not a one-way ticket. There are obligations on both sides, including our own. If we keep shaving our defence capability, might we put elements of that relationship at risk?

I also suggest that we might be creating imbalances in other areas, such as our capability to meet our foreign policy objectives, whatever they might be, and defend our interests overseas. The House knows that I have not been supportive of our military interventions over the past decade, but let us put that to one side. There have been moments during those interventions when our resources have not matched our ambitions. It was not the fault of the troops on the ground, but in Iraq and Afghanistan in particular the necessary resources were lacking, and that had a knock-on effect on our ability to achieve our objectives.

I have other concerns but, as an ex-soldier, I shall focus on the Army. The plan to disband 20,000 regulars before knowing whether the plan to recruit 30,000 reservists to take their place will work is high risk, given that we do not know whether those reservists will be able to plug the gap from a capability point of view, or from a boots-on-the-ground point of view. I ask Ministers to ensure that that issue is centrally addressed in the forthcoming White Paper. There are key questions that need answering very soon, because redundancies are taking effect as we speak, and we do not know whether the plan will work.

There is a real danger that Government proposals will prove a false economy, in financial terms and in terms of military capability. Let us take cost savings as an example. I am conscious of the figure of £1.8 billion over 10 years, and more details will follow in the White Paper, but at the moment the Government are long on promise and short on costings and details. They have admitted in the Green Paper that it costs more to train reservists than regulars. The financial incentives being offered to regulars to join the reserves mean that they will be on a better scale of pay than a serving brigadier, if we include the £5,000 sign-up bonus, the bounty, the daily rate and so forth. There is also the question of civilian salaries being matched, although I am aware that the Government are considering capping an element of that. Again, we need to see the details. And all that is before we even consider the fact that the reservists will not be deployable in their first year.

I have already raised the question of the number of reservists that will be required. According to Ministry of Defence figures, the present Territorial Army mobilisation rate is 40%. If we apply that to the 20,000 regulars, we will need 50,000 reservists. I look forward to seeing the details of how that magic figure of 40% is going to be increased. It will take a concerted effort to achieve a mobilisation rate of much more than 40%, given that many people in the Army believe that we are not even hitting 40% at the moment.

There is also the question of the capability gap. In the 1980s, when many of us served, the TA did a very good job that basically involved reservists being transported out to Germany, digging a trench and waiting for the Soviet or Warsaw pact forces to arrive. Today, asymmetric warfare is becoming the norm. The skills base will become much higher, and our requirements will be much more demanding, yet I understand that the number of training days is being increased to 40 overall—an increase of only five days. I question that on the capability front, particularly when those forces are going to be mobilised as groups rather than as add-ons. That factor must be considered.

[Dr Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend share my fear that, with the scale of priorities we have at the moment, there is a danger that if we reduce the size of the Army much more, they will all be able to fit into the single first High Speed 2 train?

[Mr Baron]

Let us hope it is not a one-way ticket!

Let me finish with a concern some of us have about the potentially distorting effect on the ground. Excellent, well recruited battalions, such as the 2nd Battalion the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers, are being axed, while more poorly recruited battalions are being saved. It is costing millions of pounds to keep over-strength battalions up to the mark. Such a policy is, in many respects, simply reinforcing failure.

In conclusion, I think this is a high-risk policy, and I ask Ministers to make sure that they cover the base very carefully. In my view, we need to see concrete evidence that the reservist plan will take effect and will work—before we let the regular battalions go. Here we are dealing with the defence of the realm, and this is happening when many countries not necessarily friendly to the west are arming and increasing their expenditure on defence. No one here can tell when or where the next threat will come from. I therefore ask Ministers to consider these points very carefully.

University Admission

Debate between John Baron and Julian Lewis

Tuesday 8th March 2011 Westminster Hall

[Dr Julian Lewis]

rose—

[Mr Baron]

rose—