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Mr. Cook: I shall answer all three questions.
I asked the right hon. Gentleman whether the Government accepted all the conclusions of the Scott report, and he replied:
To avoid all doubt, I shall refer to the statement that he made to the House, which appears in the Hansard. Let us hear what he said one more time. I ask to hear it again because, while the right hon. Gentleman was telling me on the Floor of the House that the Government accepted the Scott report's conclusions, his information officers were in the Press Gallery handing out a press pack.It claimed that the Scott report exonerated Ministers,and it stated:
As a press guide to the conclusions of the Scott report, that was flatly untrue.
Can the President of the Board of Trade confirm whether the Government accept those conclusions? Do they accept the conclusions, or, when the right hon. Gentleman said, "Yes, we accept the conclusions," did he mean that the Government accept only those conclusions that support their position? If the right hon. Gentleman will not tell us, what about his boss?
Mr. Cook:
I give the right hon. and learned Gentleman an undertaking that I shall give way towards the end of my speech, because, by then, every single one of his charges will be nailed. At the moment--[Interruption.]
Mr. Cook:
At the moment, I am playing some bigger fish.
What about the right hon. Gentleman's boss? When he set up the inquiry, the Prime Minister wrote to me and said:
That fact has been established. Will the Prime Minister accept that Ministers broke their own guidelines? He told me that the inquiry was set up to investigate that issue,so will he now accept the result?
Upon reading the Scott report, I am unclear why an inquiry was needed to establish whether the guidelines were changed. In the week that the Prime Minister set up the inquiry, he was minuted by his private secretary, whose remarks appear in paragraph D4.51 of the report. He told him:
In his evidence to the Scott inquiry, the Prime Minister said:
Mr. Lang:
The hon. Gentleman may want to assist the House by pointing out that that occurred in July 1990, which was long after the time in question. It was a decision taken by a Committee presided over by the Foreign Secretary, about which my right hon. Friend,the then Chancellor and present Prime Minister, was subsequently told. That recommendation was not passed on to the Prime Minister for approval, because the imminent invasion of Kuwait by Iraq ruled it out. The matter was not proceeded with.
Mr. Cook:
The right hon. Gentleman should listen to what he has just said: the month before Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, the Government were willing to relax the guidelines still further.
Mr. Kaufman:
As the President of the Board of Trade has intervened inaccurately--to describe it in friendly terms--upon my hon. Friend, we should draw attention to the fact that Mr. Wall's statement to the Prime Minister--
was dated 13 November 1992. In that submission to the Prime Minister, his private secretary said:
That is why, knowing those words, the President of the Board of Trade was too timorous to give way to me.
Mr. Cook:
My right hon. Friend is absolutely right. The nub of the memorandum is: why did the Prime Minister and others feel able to tell the House that the guidelines had not been changed when they had that evidence?
I return to the right hon. and learned Gentleman's other charge, about the Government arming Saddam Hussein.It was in our motion, which said:
Sir Richard's report reveals that, three years before the Gulf war, there were intelligence reports that Iraq had placed multi-million pound orders with four British companies, including Matrix Churchill, to equip its armaments factories at Nassr. The same intelligence
reports warned that annual production targets for Nassr were 10,000 missiles, 150,000 artillery shells, 100,000 mortar shells and 300,000 fin-stabilised shells.
Mr. David Shaw (Dover):
They were not British.
Mr. Cook:
The hon. Gentleman says that they were not British. They were made on British machines. That is what I am reading out.
Mr. Shaw:
That is not the same.
Mr. Cook:
The hon. Gentleman says that it is not the same, but it was never our case that Saddam Hussein would shove the machine tools down gun barrels and fire them at his enemies. Our case was always that he would use those machine tools to turn out shells, some of which may well have been fired at British forces in the Gulf war.
Sir Richard paints a scandalous picture of the failure of intelligence reports by Whitehall to reach those who needed information--although, once again, no Minister will accept responsibility for that departmental failure--but enough information did reach Ministers to ring alarm bells, if they had wanted to hear them.
Mr. Phil Gallie (Ayr):
Can the hon. Gentleman help me on this point? He said that British companies had sold machines to Iraq. I heard him make the statement that they had secretly sold arms to Saddam Hussein. It does not refer to anyone having secretly sold machines to Saddam Hussein. It referred to secretly selling arms. The hon. Gentleman has a reputation for propagating porkies, so will he answer that question?
Mr. Cook:
I have to say to the hon. Gentleman that to claim that selling machine tools that produced the shells that went into those gun barrels was not arming Saddam Hussein is--to borrow a word from Sir Richard Scott--sophistry. Perhaps I should explain to the hon. Gentleman that sophistry means a plausible answer that, on further investigation, is plainly misleading.
Sir Timothy Sainsbury (Hove):
Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Cook:
No. I must continue with my speech.[Hon. Members: "Give way."] Perhaps I should give way to the right hon. Gentleman, as he was one of those who came to the Dispatch Box and repeatedly denied that there had been a change in guidelines.
Sir Timothy Sainsbury:
Will the hon. Gentleman have the grace to admit that, if anything in the entire episode lacks credibility, it is his suggestion that, when he said that the Government had armed Saddam Hussein, he was trying to do anything other than give the impression that lethal weapons had been sold?
Mr. Cook:
I have it here. The motion that I moved in the House three years ago stated:
That has consistently been our argument. Moreover, they knew where those machine tools were going as early as February 1989. The right hon. Gentleman shakes his head, but it is in paragraph D6.94.
In February 1989, when he was in the very act of negotiating change in guidelines with his colleagues, the Chief Secretary was given a minute that told him:
Matrix Churchill
They knew what they were approving, and the knowledge went much higher than the Chief Secretary. It would be unfair if he were left to take the rap.
A year earlier, an intelligence digest warned the then Prime Minister that Matrix Churchill
The problem was that Ministers kept turning a deaf ear to the alarm bells. When the Chief Secretary was warned that some of the machine tools might go into the Iraqi nuclear programme, he replied that screwdrivers are also required to make hydrogen bombs.
After the Gulf war, the International Atomic Energy Agency found 30 Matrix Churchill lathes in Iraqi nuclear plants. Faced with that evidence, how dare Ministers still claim that they did not arm Saddam Hussein?
"Yes, the Government accept the conclusions".--[Official Report, 15 February 1996; Vol. 271, c. 1148.]
"There was no change of policy in 1989".
"Whether Ministers themselves breached their own guidelines is one of the things that will be established by the inquiry".
26 Feb 1996 : Column 608
"as Chancellor of the Exchequer you knew that the Government had decided to change the guidelines".
"One of the charges at the time"--
"as Chancellor of the Exchequer you knew that the Government had decided to change the guidelines"--
"the Howe Guidelines of 1985 were amended by Ministers in December 1988 but the amendment was never announced to Parliament".
"British servicemen may have been exposed to fire from shells and rockets made in munitions factories equipped by Britain".
"British servicemen may have been exposed to fire from shells and rockets made in munitions factories equipped by Britain".
26 Feb 1996 : Column 610
"The Iraqis intended to use"
"to supply machinery for the new armaments and munitions factories of the Nassr and Hutteen State Establishments".
"has been heavily involved [in the supply of equipment to Iraq for use in arms production]".
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