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5.42 pm
Mr. Menzies Campbell (Fife, North-East): I entirely agree with the last point made by the right hon. Member for Bridgwater (Mr. King). I fear that there was almost nothing in the remainder of his speech with which I could agree.
Sir Richard Scott and the hon. Member for Livingston (Mr. Cook) have demonstrated eloquently that by ministerial design Parliament was denied the opportunity to hold the Government to account over their policy on the supply of arms to Iraq. The Parliament that today does not assert that right will merely compound and homologate the breach of constitutional responsibility that has been identified on so many occasions by Sir Richard. As the Government refuse to impose any sanction on themselves, only Parliament can now do so, even in the artificial terms that are offered to us by a Division at10 o'clock.
This is a Government who refuse to accept any responsibility. Mistakes were made; who made them? This is a Government who have ignored distortions and who have denied the main findings of the Scott report. Neither the Ministers involved nor the Prime Minister, who carries ultimate responsibility, will acknowledge any fault. Blaming the system is a well-worn and unconvincing excuse for indefensible behaviour. The fault found in the report was compounded by the fault in the handling of the report.
There were disgraceful efforts to undermine the report in advance. Silly arrangements were made for publication. The statement made by the President of the Board of Trade a week ago on Thursday was disingenuous. There was a failure to reflect the overall weight of the report. The Treasury's press release had to be acknowledged to be wrong by the Government. Selective quotations at the press conference so angered Sir Richard that he felt compelled to intervene in the debate.
If you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, need corroboration of the arrogance of government that is identified in the report,it is to be found in the arrogance that has surrounded its publication. The central charges that Sir Richard has made against the Government are that policy was changed in 1988, the text of the guidelines published in 1985 was altered, no publicity was given to that change and the failure to inform Parliament was deliberate. The overriding reason for all that was the fear of public opposition. The relevant reference is D4.42. Everything else flows from that conclusion.
The Government have sought to describe their unwillingness to accept Sir Richard's simple conclusion as something of an "honest difference in opinion". I doubt whether Sir Richard would describe it as such. Such a description is wholly unjustified.
What is the alternative view? To summariseSir Richard's words, that view does not correspond with reality. The alternative view, again to reflect onSir Richard's words, is incapable of being "sustained by serious argument". The alternative view is misleading.I refer the House to paragraphs D3.121, 122 and 123.
Mr. Edward Leigh (Gainsborough and Horncastle):
The hon. and learned Gentleman has referred to paragraph D4. In the light of Sir Richard's conclusion in that section that the Chief Secretary did not intend to be misleading, is the hon. and learned Gentleman solemnly telling Parliament that either the Attorney-General or the Chief Secretary deliberately lied to Parliament?
Mr. Campbell:
I am not saying that and I have never made that charge. I am saying, however, that both the Attorney-General and the Chief Secretary, as Ministers of the Crown, have a duty to accept the consequences of their actions. The alternative view, which Sir Richard Scott dismisses, was set out by the Chief Secretary. Perhaps he did so out of a strong sense of duty. He is described by Sir Richard as "strenuously and consistently" asserting
That is all the more curious when we consider thatSir Richard finds elsewhere that the Chief Secretary
of the changed guidelines.
This is not merely a matter of interpretation.Sir Richard Scott had in support of the conclusion that he had reached compelling evidence from three separate sources. The first was Mark Higson, to whom reference has already been made. He was the desk officer for Iraq at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office between March 1989 and January 1990. He wrote some of the letters that were received by hon. Members on both sides of the House--letters that did not reveal the true situation. Mark Higson ultimately resigned.
The second source was Mr. John Goulden, then an official at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.He gave evidence to the Select Committee on Trade and Industry during the super-gun inquiry. He told the inquiry that the third guideline was amended to take account of the ceasefire. The Government did not challenge that finding when the Select Committee's report was made public.
The third source was Sir Timothy Daunt. I refer to his minute of 18 November 1992. He wrote that it was his judgment that three Ministers had agreed to change the guidelines, to relax their application and not to make any announcement. He added that what they had done
Dr. Hampson:
The hon. and learned Gentleman and I were both members of the Select Committee to which he has referred and I recognise that he has taken up an important statement. But why does he think that when the Select Committee published a statement that the guidelines had been changed no member of his party,no occupant of the Opposition Front Bench and no other Member of this place complained that he or she had been badly done by? No one raised the issue, yet now we have so much synthetic noise.
Mr. Campbell:
We did not challenge it because we accepted it. The reason why the Government did not challenge it, we are now told, is that they did not accept it. If one is looking for "Alice in Wonderland", one will find her more easily on the Government Front Bench than anywhere else.
This all shows that Sir Richard was entitled to reach the conclusion, which he sets out in his report, that between the ceasefire and the war between Iran and Iraq in 1990 Parliament and the public were
This all makes the Government's assertion thatSir Richard Scott found that no arms were sent to Saddam Hussein wholly unconvincing. I remind hon. Members of the atmosphere in the House when we were recalled during the summer recess to debate the Gulf war. At that time, as the right hon. Member for Bridgwater will remember, as he and I had private conversations about this, there was considerable anxiety about the extent of casualties that British forces might sustain in a war in the Gulf. Let us suppose that Saddam Hussein had used nuclear weapons. Would we have been able to go to the parents or relations of any of our constituents who had been the subject of nuclear attack and say, "It's all right. We didn't sell them nuclear weapons. We sold them only the machine tools by which they might be made"?
Mr. Henry Bellingham (North-West Norfolk):
If the Liberals had been in power, we would have possessed no deterrent!
Mr. Campbell:
If the hon. Gentleman thinks that Saddam Hussein has the kind of rational mind that will be affected by the finer points of nuclear deterrence, the history of the past five or six years stands substantially against him.
Let us suppose that some of our constituents had been killed by shells manufactured by Saddam Hussein. Would it have served us much to say to their friends, relations or parents, "We didn't sell him shells. The Royal Ordnance factory didn't send them. Matrix Churchill supplied him with machine tools for that purpose." That is a wholly artificial distinction in the minds of the British public, and the artificiality of the distinction is emphasised by the
brutal honesty of Mr. Alan Clark. Remember him? We do not hear much about him these days. There has not been a Gadarene rush from the Government Front Bench to assert his integrity, but he is the person who, at the meeting on 20 January 1988, told the Machine Tool Technologies Association, and Mr. Henderson, who later stood trial, to emphasise the civilian and not the military use of any machine tools that might be sent to Iraq.
Are we to believe that Mr. Clark kept all that to himself? From his diaries, he does not seem to be a man who keeps very much to himself--of anything. Are we to believe that he was conducting some clandestine policy of his own, quite separate from the Government? [Hon. Members: "Yes!] Apart from alliteration, the idea has nothing to commend it. Alan Clark was right at the centre of government. He was playing Darnley to Queen Elizabeth. He was the favourite of the monarch in No. 10. The idea that he was going around conducting some secret policy and telling only the Machine Tool Technologies Association of his views simply does not bear scrutiny.
Once the central conclusion of the report is accepted, all else flows from it. Paragraph 27 of "Questions of Procedures for Ministers" was ignored. The convention of ministerial accountability to the House was ruptured.Why did that happen? Because the public would not have liked the idea of assisting Saddam Hussein to build up his arsenal; because they would not have liked the idea that we were assisting a dictator who had used chemical weapons, with devastating effect, on his own countrymen at Halabja; and because they would have wanted to know not only why we were selling him arms but why we were financing those sales, or at least the means to make them. Do the Government think that the public were not entitled to know of those things? If so, let them say so and then the public can make their own judgment.
Some say that this should not be a witch hunt. "Why", they ask, "should the Chief Secretary take responsibility?" I do not reflect on the Chief Secretary's honour, but I ask him to reflect on this. What confidence can the public have in Ministers of the Crown if they are not willing to take the consequences of their actions? The Chief Secretary was, as Sir Richard Scott found, the midwife of the policy change. He agreed to it being kept from public and Parliament. He wrote letters or answered questions that did not give accurate answers. His explanations of how he behaved in that regard have been dismissed as sophistry. As a result, he was responsible for a breach of ministerial rules and, ultimately, for a rupture of the convention of ministerial responsibility.
"his belief, in the face of . . . overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that policy on defence sales to Iraq had . . . remained unchanged."
"had been one of the midwives"
"may be represented as culpably failing to inform Parliament of a significant change to the guidelines of October 1985."
"designedly led to believe that a stricter policy towards non-lethal defence exports and dual use exports to Iraq was being applied than was in fact the case."
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