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7.35 pm
Mr. Quentin Davies (Stamford and Spalding): I greatly welcomed the Prime Minister's decision to set up the Scott inquiry. It seemed to me designed to establish higher standards of integrity and openness in public life. It seemed an admission that, if there had been problems or allegations, the Government did not mind having a learned judge take an independent look at the machinery of government. It was a fine and brave decision, and I proudly hoped that we would stay on that high road.
Over the past few days, however, I have been somewhat disappointed. I was disappointed by the speech made this evening by my right hon. Friend the President of the Board of Trade. He made a characteristically able speech, in which he mentioned a great many things--everything and anything, as far as I could see, including arms sales policies of the 1960s and information technology arrangements in the Customs and Excise. Indeed, he mentioned everything except the subject that we ought to be examining tonight.
The subject that we should examine tonight concerns the fact that the learned judge, Lord Justice Scott, has after three years has come back to the House with his five volumes and his 1,800 pages of detailed analysis and with the considered judgment that the Chief Secretary to the Treasury was guilty of misleading Parliament.
Unfortunately, there is absolutely no ambiguity about these judgments. I offer hon. Members three small extracts. The first reads:
That comes on page 475 of the report. The second example comes from page 495 of volume I:
The third example is to be found on page 507 of volume I:
We have two tasks before us this evening, and we had better fulfil them properly and make sure that people outside this House, and generations to come, recognise
that we have faced up to the issues. First, will we accept the judgments of Lord Justice Scott of the type that I have just read out? Secondly, if we accept them, what will we do about them? Before considering these questions, I want to issue a plea: that nothing we do in this House--I am not referring here to the Chief Secretary--can afterwards be said to have left the rest of us open to the charge that we did not always discharge our obligations with the highest degree of good faith and clarity.
Let us, therefore, not deceive ourselves. Let us not be carried away or allow ourselves to fall into the temptation of being diverted so comfortably into talking about something else so that we do not have to face the harsh reality before us. In that context, I hope that we hear nothing more about whether there was a change in the guidelines or whether the guidelines were simply being flexibly interpreted--because of course there was a change in the guidelines. There are two separate sets of guidelines: those of November 1984; and the separate text, which was agreed in December 1988, and implemented from February 1989. They are referred to in the report: the first set is referred to on page 171, and the second set on page 397. I do not have the time, in the10 minutes that I have to speak, to read them out, but they are there. So let us not fool ourselves; there were two separate guidelines.
When each set was independently valid, from 1984 to 1988 and from 1989 to 1990, it is perfectly true that they could have been interpreted more or less flexibly. But it is absolutely clear beyond a peradventure from all the evidence in the report that the whole of the Whitehall machine was working on the first set of guidelines until February 1989, and then it worked on the second set of guidelines. It is perfectly clear that the third guideline--No. 3 in the Howe guidelines; C in the separate set of Waldegrave guidelines--were conceptually very different and that very different decisions were taken. The acid test--the control experiment--is that there are at least three items for which export licences were refused correctly under the Howe guidelines, in 1988, and were accepted under the Waldegrave guidelines in 1989. Those items were a tactical radar system produced by Plessey and two simulators from Marconi and Ferranti. So let us not fool ourselves about that.
Let us also not talk about whether it is reasonable to make changes in arms sales policy--of course it is.No one is denying that; it is no problem at all. But it is very different to make changes and then pretend to the House that they have not been made. That is the point.
Let us also not fool ourselves and spend time talking about whether we perhaps should not have a policy on the disclosure of arms exports or whether we should have a policy of greater disclosure. I would perfectly accept arguments in the national interest that we should say nothing about our arms exports to the middle east. I would have been perfectly happy to accept that, and if Ministers had done that I would not have quarrelled with it, but they did not. They pretended that they were making statements that were relevant, true and informative to the House; the statements that they made were anything but that.
Let us also not spend too much time--although, of course, the point is important--discussing the integrity of my right hon. Friend the Chief Secretary. I accept his integrity and that he did not wish to mislead the House.I entirely accept that he never thought, "Wouldn't it be nice to mislead the House of Commons? How can I best
do that?" I accept that entirely and I accept, as the judge did, his sincerity in that matter but, whatever may have been his subjective sentiment at the relevant time, the objective fact--I shall prove it in a moment--is that he did mislead the House. Therefore, I am afraid that he has made a very serious mistake.
I have no wish at all to deprive the Government of an extremely able Minister and a man for whom I have always had a high personal regard, but I am afraid that he must take responsibility for that mistake. Whatever happens tonight, it must be made clear that someone is taking responsibility and that the principle has been restored that Ministers remain fully accountable to the House of Commons.
I do not have much time for quotations in the short time allotted to me in this debate, but I shall provide a couple to reinforce the point. On 7 February, my right hon. Friend, through his private secretary, replied to Mr. Alan Clark:
That was on 7 February. Over the next few months of April, May, June and July, my right hon. Friend sent a series--some 30-odd--of letters saying:
We find in the report that, from 8 February--the next day--the Ministry of Defence working group meeting was saying that
The whole bureaucracy went into a new gear and implemented loyally the new guidelines. There is some evidence that some of the civil servants did not approve of them, but that is another matter. They implemented them loyally.
We then have another direct quotation of my right hon. Friend. On 28 March, he wrote an internal memorandum, again to another Minister, to say he saw
In other words--
Mr. Deputy Speaker:
Order. Time is up.
Mr. Jim Cousins (Newcastle upon Tyne, Central):
We should remember that we are a working Parliament and that we are rightly proud--if we are to be more than a tourist attraction--of our record in calling successive Governments, whether they were represented by Ministers or by mandarins, to account.
The facts are set out in Vice-Chancellor Scott's report, and it is left to us to form the judgments and to make the conclusions. We should recall, too, that the deceits that are recorded in his report are still continuing.
Only last week, an hon. Member was told in a parliamentary reply that mortar-locating radar was sold to the Iraqis in the 1980s because it was deemed at the time not to be a significant enhancement of the Iraqis' ability to make war. We can clearly see from the Scott report what that meant at the time. The report recounts how Lord Howe, then the Foreign Secretary, reviewed defence sales
to Iran. He was told by senior officials that we had sold 10 times as much defence equipment to the Iraqis as we had to the Iranians. The reason was that Iraq was
So the Iranians, who were poorly equipped and relying on human wave attacks, would find mortar-locating radar very useful--it would be a "significant enhancement"--but the Iraqis were already equipped to mow those attacks down and would not find them such an enhancement.The supply of mortar-locating radar would, therefore, have made only a slight difference to them. That is the quality of argument that Lord Justice Scott found rehearsed between the Foreign Secretary and senior Foreign Office officials on 7 November 1986. How shameful, how disgusting and--as it turned out--how utterly mistaken was that argument.
The report demonstrates that a Minister approved the diversion of 29 armoured recovery vehicles--tank hulls fitted with cranes--from Jordan to Iraq, in flagrant breach of all the undertakings that had been given to Parliament. That was done, and it was concealed.
The exporters were not always shady outfits from the grimmer reaches of the M25. In one dramatic case, a Government-owned company committed that type of offence. In 1986, a British Government-owned company sold to the Iraqis British designs for a specialist weapons testing centre to be built at Basra. That company, whose sole shareholder was the Ministry of Defence, wrote to the Ministry of Defence that it was conscious of the need for a low profile. The company also stated that the Iraqi officers, who were to be trained to use the weapons testing centre, were to be designated and disguised as civilian Government servants during their stay in the United Kingdom. What did the Ministers and civil servants responsible at that time imagine that the weapons testing centre would be used for? Table tennis? Nor was that deal good business, because the export credits on the contract were never paid. Saddam did not pay and the British taxpayer paid more than £700 million.
There can be no doubt that Britain played its part in building up Saddam's strategic weapons capacity. When a defence intelligence expert was first told of Space Research Corporation's rather odd order in 1988 for the largest forgings placed with a British company since the second world war, he pointed out to his superiors and to the export controllers that his friend, Mick Bayne, formerly of the Royal Armament Research and Development Establishment--one might feel that that was a hint of a clue--worked for Space Research Corporation. Yet no inquiries were made and neither defence intelligence nor the export controllers followed up that very obvious hint. One might feel that an exchange of Christmas cards might have done it--"Dear Mick, how are the kids and what are you doing with the largest forgings built in Britain since 1945 at your company, Space Research Corporation?" Incredibly, it took another 18 months for the super-gun to be discovered. If the intelligence services function like that, they should not be allowed out after dark without a police escort. That is a record of the most demonstrable incompetence and somebody must be called to account.
"Mr. Waldegrave knew, first hand, the facts that, in my opinion, rendered the 'no change in policy' statement untrue."
"The answers to PQs, in both Houses of Parliament, failed to inform Parliament of the current state of Government policy on non-lethal arms sales to Iraq. This failure was deliberate".
"the Government's statements made in 1989 and 1990 about policy on defence exports to Iraq consistently failed . . . to comply with the standards set by paragraph 27 of the Questions of Procedure for Ministers and, more important, failed to discharge the obligations imposed by the constitutional principle of Ministerial accountability."
"Mr. Waldegrave is content for us to implement a more liberal policy on defence sales, without any public announcement on the subject."
"The Government have not changed their policy on defence sales to Iraq or Iran."
"We now have the new guidelines. We are working on those."
"no reason to change this flexible approach for applications to export defence related equipment to Iraq . . . we should now revert to the stricter implementation of the present guidelines as applied to Iran"
7.45 pm
"better equipped already, so a given item might well not be a significant enhancement for Iraq, but would be if sold to Iran."
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