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Sir Timothy Sainsbury (Hove): I think that I read a different Scott report from the one read by the hon. Member for North Durham (Mr. Radice)--I certainly drew different conclusions from it. Perhaps we might have had a more informed and rational debate on the serious subjects that he has identified if his hon. Friends on the Opposition Front Bench had had the courtesy to apologise to the House for their disgraceful and unsubstantiated allegations about Ministers and about how the Government armed Saddam Hussein, which they peddled around the country for three years. If any apology were required, that was it.
There can be no doubt about the importance of the report and the value of its recommendations. I welcome what my right hon. Friend the President of the Board of Trade said about accepting and responding to the various recommendations. I think that I am the only Member who served as a Minister in the three principal Departments involved in the matter. As Minister for Trade, I was directly involved with the specifics, and therefore I have some experience of export controls and defence exports and the complexities that they create for Ministers who have responsibilities in that area.
The report identifies quite clearly some things that did not happen and some things that should and some that should not have happened. Perhaps most importantly and most controversially, it identifies something thatSir Richard Scott thinks happened. As I have said already, it is very clear what did not happen: we did not arm Saddam Hussein, in any logical meaning of that phrase. That is absolutely incontrovertible. There is no way that the Opposition, particularly the hon. Member for Livingston (Mr. Cook), can persuade the average person that shipping dual-purpose machine tools or tools which could be used in munitions manufacture could be called "arming Saddam Hussein".
Mr. Frank Cook (Stockton, North):
Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?
Sir Timothy Sainsbury:
No, I am afraid that I do not have time.
If that were so, we could not be said to manufacture any cars in this country because, according to the Opposition's logic, if they are manufactured using Japanese machine tools they are Japanese cars. Equally, there was no conspiracy to send innocent men to gaol. I am not a lawyer and many expert lawyers have explained why that is not so; I shall leave that argument to them.
I shall concentrate on something that Sir Richard Scott thinks happened, with which many others--including,I am glad to say, my right hon. Friend the Member for Witney (Mr. Hurd)--and I do not agree. I refer to the allegation to which the Opposition have shifted: that answers given by Ministers, including me, were misleading as the guidelines--it was the first time that defence export guidelines were published--had been changed. I suppose that it is logical for the Opposition to shift to that criticism of the Government, because their more serious criticisms, which they have sustained for so long, have been rejected decisively. As that criticism is now at the forefront of the debate, it should be addressed.
I have always been somewhat sceptical aboutthe allegation. When I became Minister for Trade,I discovered that the guidelines at that time were the same as those published in 1985 and established by the then Foreign Secretary. Having read the report, I am even more convinced that the allegation that the guidelines changed cannot be substantiated. I point particularly to two quotes from the report which confirm that analysis. I direct those hon. Members who like to refer to their text to paragraph D3.100 on page 414. No one has reached for it yet--except the hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne, Central (Mr. Cousins). It contains a quote by a senior official at the Ministry of Defence in July 1989--before we began to worry about the issue. He said:
That is what an official said before the issue of changing the guidelines was raised.
I put it to the House that even Sir Richard recognises that he is putting too much weight on the wording ofthe guidelines and upon their precise interpretation.In paragraph K8.1, example (iv) on page 1799--that proves that I have read the whole report--he refers to the "adjustment" to the guidelines rather than the "change". We must recognise that talking about changing
the guidelines, about how they might be changed or even agreeing on a change of wording is not the same as changing the guidelines.
Recognising that fact, the report concedes that the guidelines were not changed but that, in effect, they were changed because the substance of the guidelines was changed. Therefore, the allegation stands that hon. Members were misled and that Parliament was not informed. I believe that that allegation is unfounded for a number of reasons.
The first good reason can be found in the speech of the right hon. Member for Bethnal Green and Stepney(Mr. Shore), who said that the guidelines were meaningless anyway. That is an extraordinary statement, which seems to undermine any suggestion that the House was misled by a change in the guidelines. A more important point is that the guidelines were not--and were never intended to be--a precise indication of how to respond to any specific export licence application. As the Minister responsible for export licences, I can confirm that fact. The guidelines were not capable of providing such an answer--if they were, we would not have needed the committees to whose minutes and proceedingsSir Richard devoted so much detailed analysis.
Secondly, the alleged change to the guidelines did not affect the volume and scale of our armaments exports, which remained a tiny percentage of total exports. Thirdly, the report gives insufficient weight to the recognised parliamentary convention of not giving details of arms sales. The fact that Sir Richard Scott may disapprove of that convention does not mean that it does not exist. I do not dispute the fact that we should debate the issue, but the information about arms sales to Iraq and elsewhere was always limited and that situation did not change. I would welcome a debate about disclosure--just as I welcome what my right hon. Friend the President of the Board of Trade said about it.
Fourthly, I believe that the charges of misleading are unfounded because Sir Richard's approach is far too legalistic. The report is written by a lawyer, sadly, without the help of assessors who have more knowledge about the real world. Parliamentary proceedings do not equate with drawing up a contract at law: real life is not like that.I am sure that any right hon. or hon. Member who has answered questions at the Dispatch Box would agree that, if his every word were taken down and turned into a legal contract, life would be quite impossible.
Mr. Sheerman:
On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. How many more former Ministers will be wheeled on to attack Sir Richard Scott?
Mr. Deputy Speaker:
That is not a matter for the Chair.
Sir Timothy Sainsbury:
The reason why Sir Richard gave so much weight to the suggestion that the House had been misled was his widely shared concern about the unnecessary secrecy surrounding Government. That is why he devoted so much attention to the Import and Export Control Act 1990, which was not otherwise relevant to his inquiry, but certainly revealed the Opposition's attitude to informing Parliament.
Mr. Richard Caborn (Sheffield, Central):
I should like to cover three issues. I have a constituency interest in the super-gun, not in Matrix Churchill, and a parliamentary interest in the matter as Chairman of the Select Committee on Trade and Industry dealing, first, with the aftermath of the super-gun and, secondly, with setting up the Committee's terms of reference for the BMARC inquiry.
In 1990, I tabled a series of questions to the then Secretary of State for Trade and Industry and wrote to the Prime Minister of the day asking whether they knew about the super-gun in 1988 or in 1989. Sir Richard Scott confirmed that I was totally misled when he wrote that
on exports of military equipment to Iraq
and indeed the Forgemasters--
He said that the Government's failure to respond constituted
There was great concern in Sheffield at the time. There were 4,000 jobs at Firth Brown--which used to be Forgemasters--and people were concerned about the way in which the Government had treated them when they had genuinely tried to provide the Government, particularly the DTI, with all the relevant information that they had at hand to prove or disprove whether the contract involved the super-gun. The way in which the Government were treating business at the time was deplorable. The powerful statements that have been made tonight about misleading Members of Parliament, and thereby their constituents, have to be taken extremely seriously and those who are responsible for that misleading should pay a price.
I became Chairman of the Select Committee on Trade and Industry in July 1992. The hon. Member for Leeds, North-West (Dr. Hampson) was wrong in his earlier intervention about following through the report of the Trade and Industry Select Committee, as the election stopped that happening. Immediately I became the Chairman of the Select Committee, the Government responded to the Committee on the export to Iraq of Project Babylon and the long-range gun.
I wrote to the then President of the Board of Trade in July 1992 and the following January I received a reply to my letter in which he promptly told me that the matter would be referred to the Scott inquiry. I know that the Deputy Prime Minister is a past master of the long game, but that takes the biscuit.
At the time, serious issues were raised by the report of the Trade and Industry Select Committee and the problems that the Committee faced in trying to extract information both from Ministers and from civil servants are on record. It became evident that the memorandum of guidance for Select Committees is somewhat weak.
Last year, the President of the Board of Trade requested the Trade and Industry Select Committee to consider the implications of BMARC. Many members of the Select Committee were involved in the super-gun inquiry and were not prepared to be sent on a fishing expedition for information because they knew that their report on the super-gun had run into the sand, partly because of the Select Committee's inability to take evidence fromthe right people. That calls into question the role of the Select Committee.
There was an exchange of letters between the Select Committee and the then President of the Board of Trade culminating in such an unsatisfactory position that the President of the Board of Trade was asked to meet the Select Committee to clear up at least some of our terms of reference and explain how much access we would have to people and papers. The transcript of that meeting has not been published. I suggest that the Select Committee should be requested to publish the transcript, the correspondence between the President of the Board of Trade and the Select Committee and the guidance notes that the Clerk of the Committee gave the Select Committee for the sitting on 27 June 1995. It is interesting to learn that Ministers had been consulted before the Scott inquiry had been published. Those documents would demonstrate the weakness of the Select Committee structure and the strength of the Executive in controlling the ability of Select Committee to obtain evidence.
Standing Order No. 130, under which Select Committees operate, illustrates those weaknesses. The BMARC inquiry that is now under way will have the same difficulties as the super-gun inquiry. The transcript of our meeting with the President of the Board of Trade will reveal that he provided very little further access to people and papers. What do I mean by that? The Select Committee asked the President of the Board of Trade for access not only to present Ministers and civil servants but to past Ministers and civil servants. We wanted to question those who were making decisions at the time and it is a matter of fact that they included past Ministers and civil servants. Present Ministers and civil servants cannot provide those answers. Scott dealt with the matter adequately in section F of his report.
Members have to take that on board and decide whether we want to bring the balance back into Parliament.Do we want to give Parliament real powers of investigation, scrutiny and reporting back? If so, we have to revisit Standing Order No. 130. Although the Public Service Select Committee will examine that issue--that is one of the concessions that the Government have made--it must be perfectly clear that the powers have to be with the Select Committees and not be biased in favour of the Executive. Select Committees exist to scrutinise, and although one commends the development of Select Committees as part of the Executive, as the hon. Member for Aldridge-Brownhills (Mr. Shepherd) said, we have the most powerful Executive in western Europe. Parliament must take that on board and see how we can bring them under much more scrutiny.
"The relaxation related to the interpretation of the guidelines, not the guidelines themselves."
"A direct answer to Mr. Caborn's question"
"would have required the DTI to accept that they had been aware in June 1988 of possible military implications of Walter Somers"--
"piping contract."
"a further example of failure to discharge the obligations of accountability."
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