---

Use of Antibiotics in Farm Animals

Mr. Bill Etherington accordingly presented a Bill to require Ministers to lay before Parliament proposals for ending the use in farm animals of antibiotics as growth promoters and for restricting the routine use of antibiotics in such animals for prophylactic purposes: And the same was read the First time; and ordered to be read a Second time on Friday 16 April, and to be printed [Bill 54].

2 Mar 1999 : Column 889

Opposition Day

[6th Allotted Day]

Sierra Leone

[Relevant documents: The Second Report from the Foreign Affairs Committee on Sierra Leone, Session 1998-99 (HC 116), and the Report of the Sierra Leone Arms Investigation, Session 1997-98 (HC 1016).]

Madam Speaker: We now come to the main business. I remind the House that the terms of the motion and the amendment before us do not cover the events on which the Foreign Secretary made a statement to the House last Wednesday--the leak of the draft report. For that reason, and because the House's settled procedure for examining and reporting on such leaks is now under way, I am prepared to permit only passing reference to those matters. I have selected the amendment in the name of the Prime Minister.

4.10 pm

Mr. Michael Howard (Folkestone and Hythe): I beg to move,

That this House endorses the criticisms made of Ministers in the Second Report of Session 1998-99 (HC 116) of the Foreign Affairs Committee on Sierra Leone and the Report of the Legg Inquiry; deplores the conduct of Ministers which led to such criticism; and calls on the Ministers concerned to accept responsibility for their conduct.

It is almost two years since a military coup in Sierra Leone ousted the democratically elected Government of President Kabbah. We shared the Government's dismay at that event. Indeed, the previous Government had helped to finance the elections which led to President Kabbah's accession. We share too, as will the whole House, the dismay that the current situation in Sierra Leone evokes. Conflict in that country continues. More than10,000 people are believed to have been killed in the wave of rebel attacks since December alone. Many more have been very seriously injured. Freetown has been left in ruins. What should be one of the richest countries in Africa is one of the poorest and most miserable. The situation has rightly been described as desperate.

The ability of the British Government to influence events in that tragic country may be limited. It is right to pay tribute to those in the diplomatic service and the armed forces, who have done what they can--and are doing what they can--to try to relieve suffering and end the conflict. But, however limited their influence, the Government are accountable to this House for their policies and action. We are here to ensure and enforce that accountability. We cannot do so unless we are told the truth--the whole truth--about the Government's policies and action. When we discover that we have not been told the whole truth, it is our duty to bring to account those responsible for that failure.

One of the ways in which we exercise such accountability is through Select Committees. I pay tribute to the Foreign Affairs Committee, under the chairmanship of the hon. Member for Swansea, East (Mr. Anderson), for its report on Sierra Leone. It is, of course, an all-party Committee; the majority of its members, however, come from the Labour party. Its report has rightly and widely

2 Mar 1999 : Column 890

been described as one of the most scathing of a Department, ever. It is certainly devastating in its criticism of officials. It is also devastating, however, in its criticism of Ministers, and it is that aspect on which I intend to concentrate. In the light of your observations, Madam Speaker, I shall not deal at all with the revelations of last week. I shall focus on the specific criticism of Ministers in the Select Committee report and in the Legg report.

If one listens to what Ministers have said, one could be forgiven for believing that there was no such criticism in either report. The Foreign Secretary said of the Legg report:

"I would perfectly happily accept any criticisms of myself in the report, but there are none."--[Official Report, 27 July 1998;Vol. 317, c. 28.]

Very, very shortly after the publication of the Select Committee report, the Prime Minister said on the Jimmy Young show:

"The criticisms are made of civil servants and not Government Ministers."

He also said that there was nothing new in the report--a claim described as "absolutely absurd" by the Chairman of the Select Committee. One reference in volume I of the Select Committee report seems to offer some succour to the Foreign Secretary. On page LXXXII, we find the following sentence:

"As far as Ministers were concerned, there is not a scintilla of evidence to suggest that they deliberately misled Parliament."

Unfortunately for Ministers, that sentence appears in a paragraph to which the Committee did not agree. It was excised from the report; not even the hon. Member for Dundee, West (Mr. Ross) was prepared to vote for it. That attempt to exculpate Ministers comprehensively failed. In fact, both reports contain serious criticism of Ministers. I shall begin with the Select Committee's criticism of the Foreign Secretary's failure to co-operate with it.

Mr. Mike Gapes (Ilford, South): May I draw the right hon. and learned Gentleman's attention to paragraph 112 of volume I of the report--the postscript? Is he saying that the Committee did not agree to that paragraph before it was published? That paragraph, which contains the words that he is disputing, states:

"We commend the resolute support which the British Government is giving to the restoration of democracy and to the alleviation of suffering."

Is not that in the report?

Mr. Howard: I do not know what that has to do with the points that I am making. If the hon. Gentleman will bear with me for a moment, he will understand the criticisms. At paragraph 7 of the report, the Committee records how its work was impeded by the Government's refusal to release to it

"firstly telegrams concerning Sierra Leone, and secondly . . . information which fell within the ambit of the Legg inquiry."

At paragraph 8, the Committee sets out what it describes as further "frustrations" that it encountered. It asked to hear three of the officials involved in the affair; it was allowed to see only two. It was not allowed to see relevant

2 Mar 1999 : Column 891

intelligence reports. Its requests to take evidence in private from the head of the Secret Intelligence Service, or to be briefed by him in private, were also refused. At paragraph 101, the Committee says:

"it would be quite wrong and an unacceptable precedent for a Government in the future to be able to argue that any select committee inquiry could be superseded, or perhaps blocked for a considerable period of time, by a whistled-up departmental inquiry."

The Committee recommends

"that the Government undertake in future to respect select committees' requirements for information, irrespective of any departmental inquiry on related matters which might have been established."

At paragraph 107, the Committee says:

"We greatly regret that we were not given access to intelligence material and that we were refused the opportunity to take evidence from the Director of the SIS."

It notes:

"We cannot now say that we have had access to all the sources of information which would have allowed us to come to unequivocal conclusions."

The Committee condemns what it calls the Government's obduracy and, at paragraph 108, it contrasts

"the reluctance of the Foreign Secretary"

with the helpfulness of other Ministers, including the Defence Secretary. It recommends that the Government reflect, in

"any future inquiry like that into Sandline,"

as to the merit of what it calls

"a more mature attitude towards controlled access for the Foreign Affairs Committee to appropriate intelligence material and to witnesses from the Secret Intelligence Service."

The House will wish to take those observations and recommendations extremely seriously. In relation to the Foreign Secretary, they exemplify and underline the obstructive attitude that he took to the Select Committee's inquiry. They provide yet further evidence of the arrogance with which he and the Government treat Parliament. In my remaining remarks, I shall focus on the substantive failure on the part of Ministers to which both the Select Committee and the Legg inquiry drew attention. The Select Committee put it in this way:

"We conclude that the government policy on individual arms embargoes must never again be stated in a way which could mislead Parliament, the public and even the FCO's own staff."

The Legg inquiry concluded:

"Government has a responsibility to give citizens, and its own officials, reasonable publicity and explanation of the laws it makes under delegated powers, especially laws creating serious criminal offences. That was not done in this case."

Those are very serious charges. They are abundantly justified by the contents of the two reports. As I shall show, Ministers were directly involved.

What happened, in essence, was as follows. Ministers decided, for good reasons, to impose an arms embargo on Sierra Leone after the junta had deposed President Kabbah. For understandable reasons, they made that embargo comprehensive in scope. It had the goal of drying up arms supplies to all the parties in Sierra Leone; that was the objective of Ministers. Yet the embargo was consistently and deliberately described as a partial embargo. It was that misdescription which was misleading--to Parliament, the public and even the

2 Mar 1999 : Column 892

Foreign and Commonwealth Office's own staff--and, as we shall see, that misdescription was the responsibility of Ministers. That is the essence of the charge that we make.

The ministerial decision to impose an embargo on Sierra Leone was implemented first by a resolution of the Security Council of the United Nations and subsequently by an Order in Council.

That order made it a criminal offence, punishable by a maximum of seven years' imprisonment, to supply or deliver arms and military equipment to

"any persons connected with Sierra Leone."

As Legg and the Select Committee found, if, indeed, any such finding was necessary, it was the Government's duty to publicise and explain that law. Yet the Government wholly failed to discharge that duty. Every document that they issued which sought to explain it, every statement that they made about it, was, in the words of the Foreign Secretary himself, "plainly wrong".

Those statements included Foreign Office daily bulletins, a telegram to posts in west Africa advising them of the embargo's ambit, an answer to the House from the Minister of State, the hon. Member for Manchester, Central (Mr. Lloyd), even a reference to the embargo in the communique of the Commonwealth Heads of Government conference at Edinburgh, to which the Prime Minister put his name.

The statements extended it to a letter, written by a senior Foreign Office official to the Foreign Minister of Sierra Leone--I quote verbatim from the Select Committee's report--

"making it clear that the UN sanctions applied to the Junta but without disclosing that, in the British government's view, they also applied to the very government to whose Foreign Minister she was writing."

All that would be bad enough if it had been accidental, but it was deliberate. That is what the Legg inquiry concluded. It stated:

"the British framers of the October 1977 Resolution"--

the Security Council resolution--

" . . . did not doubt that the arms embargo imposed by the Resolution was comprehensive in its coverage."

It continued:

"However, British officials and Ministers"--

I stress "and Ministers"--

"continued to play this aspect down".

Legg goes on to explain why. It was, the inquiry says, partly because of the sensitivities about the possible role of the Economic Community of West African States, which, unlike Her Majesty's Government, had explicitly contemplated the use of force, and about the role of Nigeria within ECOWAS and the ECOWAS military observer group.

There, in a nutshell, we have it. A deliberate attempt was made to mis-state the scope and effect of the embargo, to play it down, in the words of the Legg report, because British officials and Ministers knew that those on the ground in Africa contemplated the use of force. What was the role of individual Ministers in all this? The Minister of State authorised United Nations Security Council resolutions. He saw and approved the Order in Council which created the criminal offences. He knew that its scope was comprehensive. That, after all, was his policy. Yet on 12 March 1998 he told the House that the sanctions were imposed "on the military junta".

2 Mar 1999 : Column 893

That could have been an oversight. It could have been inadvertent. The Minister of State could have done what "Questions of Procedure for Ministers" require him to do, which is to

"correct any inadvertent error at the earliest opportunity."

But he has not done that. The Minister of State and the Foreign Secretary persisted for months in their attempt to justify their mis-statement of the effect of the embargo as

"not inconsistent with the fact that it was not only to the Junta to which the arms embargo applied."

It was that explanation to which the Select Committee referred when it gave its damning findings in paragraph 19 of its report that

"half-truths are a dangerous commodity in which to trade."

What an extraordinary thing for a Select Committee to say about the language of a Foreign Secretary and his Department.

---