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Mr. Stern: I can repeat to my hon. Friend only that the fact that the courts are already charged with that duty in certain matters is not an excuse for extending it. The Bill would extend to large new areas an attempt to define the public interest. I have tried to describe to him areas, particularly in the public sector, where it becomes almost impossible to define where that interest lies. The fact that we are charging the courts with that does not make it any more satisfactory.
Clause 8 is the most obnoxious clause in the Bill. I use the word "obnoxious" advisedly. I apologise to the hon. Member for Islwyn, because, owing to a constituency engagement, I shall be unable to remain until the end of the debate, but if he will undertake to remove clause 8 in Committee I shall change all my constituency arrangements and stay to vote to give his Bill a Second Reading. I notice that he does not rise to reply.
Clause 8 is not only obnoxious but is one of the significant reasons why the Bill, as drafted, must not be passed. It seeks to go beyond creating additional rights for whistleblowers by creating additional rights for journalists, but the two do not have the same moral authority. Those of us who have been in the House for some years have seen the extent to which the balance of power in our society has changed against Parliament and in favour of greater powers by the media to influence the direction of society.
Mr. Tam Dalyell (Linlithgow):
Like my hon. Friends the Members for Stoke-on-Trent, Central (Mr. Fisher) and for Islwyn (Mr. Touhig), I pay tribute to that tireless campaigner, Maurice Frankel, with whom I have worked on and off for 15 years. We would not be debating this subject today were it not for his work.
I shall concentrate on one aspect of the matter--the position of those who try to prevent the deception of the House of Commons. It is not only a question of trying to prevent Ministers from being economical with the truth. In cases of deep deception, the function of the whistle- blower is perhaps to prompt questions that ought to be asked, which no politician would know how to ask if there were not some inside information. I defy any of my colleagues to ask the right questions without a basis of information.
The Bill is not a panacea but, as my hon. Friend the Member for Islwyn said, it would create an atmosphere in which it would be clear that corners should not be cut.I say to the Whips that it would be discreditable to politicians in general if the Bill were snuffed out and not allowed to go to Committee. That would bring us all into disrepute.
My parliamentary colleagues will forgive me if I speak with passion and emotion, but succinctly, about public disclosure. In late January and early February 1985, I spent 11 uncomfortable days in the Old Bailey dreading that what I had done, which I believed to be right and still believe to be right, would land in gaol for some years a civil servant who had placed his higher duty to the British Parliament above his obligation to Ministers.
Let us be clear about the circumstances of the case of Clive Ponting. It was not a question whether he held views on the merits or demerits of sinking the Argentine cruiser Belgrano. Actually, he did not dissent--his views were not all that different from those of Ministers--but he knew that questions that had been put legitimately by me in the elected Parliament of our democracy were being given answers that were truncated to the point of distortion or, in some key areas, being untruthfully answered to avoid political embarrassment. It was the deception of Parliament, not disagreement with military action, that motivated Ponting.
The Bill has the potential to make it more possible for a civil servant to ensure that Parliament is not misled by Ministers. Furthermore, the mere existence of the legislation could be a deterrent that might make Ministers think twice before cutting corners in their answers to parliamentary questions.
In the autumn of 1984, I received an anonymous letter in my constituency post. Most anonymous letters go into the waste paper basket, but this one was different. It was concise and precise and from my, at that time, encyclopaedic knowledge of the circumstances surrounding the sinking of the Belgrano, I realised that it could have been formulated only by someone who was at the very heart of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the Cabinet Office or the Ministry of Defence. It was no ordinary letter.
I shall deal, first, with what I was told as the receptacle for Ponting's then anonymous information and what I ought to have done as a Member of Parliament; and, secondly, with what Ponting was told in the High Court
he ought to have done--because the unrealistic nature of that advice makes the case for allowing the Bill to go to Committee.
First, I was told that I should have handed the letter to the Ministry of Defence, but who would ever again trust an MP who took such action, dropped his sources into the cart, and allowed the fingerprinting of documents and their subjection to modern techniques that can easily lead to identification?
I behaved "responsibly". I did not go to Chris Moncrieff or to any newspaper. I had the nous to keep the information as a proceeding in Parliament, but I naively supposed that the Chairman of the Select Committee on Foreign Affairs, which the Ponting information revealed had been deceived above all others in the course of an investigation, might be interested in making use of the information to expose the deception of his Select Committee.
Not one bit of it. Without consulting the members of his Committee or even its senior members such as the late Ian Mikardo, or my hon. Friend the Member for Newham, South (Mr. Spearing), or his Conservative colleagues, the Chairman handed my letter to his ministerial chums--I use that word on purpose--in the Ministry of Defence. It transpired that the Chairman was far more concerned to find the source of the leak than to bother himself about whether the Select Committee which he had the honour to chair had been lied to.
As soon as the Ministry of Defence got its hands on the letter, Ponting was identified and confessed. I remember shaving on the Saturday morning and hearing on the7 o'clock news the headline that a civil servant by the name of Ponting had been suspended and charged. That was the first time that I heard the name of Clive Ponting.
The moral of all that is that it is wishful thinking to suppose that Select Committees will perform the task of serious inquiry that is necessary and which may be made more possible by the suggestions in the Bill.
Mr. Robathan:
The hon. Gentleman has been pursuing this issue for some years. He says that Select Committees are not able properly to carry out their tasks. Does he believe the corollary, that the press is the right body to pursue justice in the public interest? That is surely what he suggests.
Mr. Dalyell:
I am suggesting support for the serious mechanisms that are set out in the Bill. I emphasise that I did not run to Chris Moncrieff. I dwell on that case because, as a cause celebre, it is important in the continuing argument.
To say that Members of Parliament have scope for righting wrongs done to Parliament by the Executive was not real then and is not real now. On crunch issues, Select Committee Chairmen and members inevitably put party before public interest. That is the response tothe intervention by the hon. Member for Blaby(Mr. Robathan).
If the Chairman of the Select Committee had been primarily concerned with the public interest, he would have used Ponting's information to formulate the right questions to ask on the basis of the insider information with which he had been provided. That he did nothing of the kind tends to make the case for the Bill.
So much for what a Member of Parliament should have done. What was Ponting to have done? He should have complained through the normal civil service channels. He did complain to his immediate superiors--my hon. Friend the Member for Islwyn said that the Bill would cover that--but to go on and on that route and nag at them would simply have damaged his career, was he would have become known as a troublemaker, making waves of difficulty.
It was suggested to the Old Bailey that he should have gone to the head of the civil service. That makes the imagination boggle. Just imagine a grade 5 civil servant going along, without telling anyone what it is about, and knocking on the door of the then Sir Robert Armstrong, now Lord Armstrong of Ilminster. [Interruption.] I see my hon. Friend the Member for Stratford-on-Avon (Mr. Howarth) laughing. He has ministerial experience. He can easily imagine the scene.
What was a man in Ponting's position to say? "Please Sir, Ministers are telling porkies to Tam Dalyell MP to protect the position of the Prime Minister, atMrs. Thatcher's very personal insistence"? What would have happened to a civil servant who had done that? His feet would not have touched the proverbial ground until he was out of the civil service. It is unreal to suggest that anyone below the rank of a grade 1 civil servant can sail into the office of the Cabinet Secretary and the head of the civil service and complain that the Prime Minister is lying to the House of Commons on politically delicate matters. There must be machinery along the lines that my hon. Friend for Islwyn suggests.
It is all very well for the hon. Member for Blaby to ask what happens to a Member of Parliament who pursues such matters. Surely, he implies, the House of Commons should do something. An hon. Member who pursues such matters is thrown out of the House of Commons when he becomes very blunt, as he has to, and, having been thrown out five times, I know what it is about. It is not a pleasant experience. I should like some machinery, such as that proposed by my hon. Friend the Member for Islwyn, which would have prevented my being thrown out of the House five times for making an argument that has subsequently turned out, in the case of the Falkland islands and of Westland, to be accurate.
That, my colleagues may say to me, is history; but the Scott inquiry is not history. I tabled two questions:
I shall not take up the time of the House with the answers to those questions other than to say what Lord Justice Scott said. In paragraph D4.42 of his report, he said:
I repeat, he said that that failure was deliberate. In paragraph D4.40, he said:
The report outlines the precise significance of those questions.
I knew at the time that they were highly significant questions--otherwise, I would not have tabled them. I also knew that the answer was totally unsatisfactory. Why did not I pursue the matter further? Bluntly, I was stretching the patience of the previous right hon. Member for Islwyn, Mr. Kinnock, who had a quiet word with me and said, "If you are thrown out of the House a sixth or seventh time, you will simply bring the Labour party into disrepute." Such peer pressure from colleagues is very strong.
"To ask the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry what steps he took to satisfy himself that the die-forging plant to be built by Matrix-Churchill would not be used in producing parts for ballistic missiles or the supergun project Babylon before he issued an export licence."
"To ask the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry what consideration was given to the site at which, and the purposes for which, the lathes produced by 600 Services of Colchester for al-Hillal were to be used before he issued an export licence."--[Official Report, 8 May 1990; Vol. 172, c. 64-66.]
"The answers to parliamentary questions, in both Houses of Parliament, failed to inform Parliament of the current state of Government policy on non-lethal sales to Iraq. This failure was deliberate and was an inevitable result of the agreement".
1 Mar 1996 : Column 1138
"In April 1990 Mr Tam Dalyell MP put down two questions for the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry."
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