| Previous Section | Index | Home Page |
3 Apr 2003 : Column 1113—continued
3.4 pm
Mr. Paul Tyler (North Cornwall): I always enjoy participating in these debates, and I can honestly say that I usually go away from them feeling that I have learned a great deal. That is not a familiar experience in all debates in the House, as other Members will testify. Today has been no exception, and I look forward to hearing further contributions from colleagues on both sides of the House.
I should like to return in a few minutes to the issue of the war and how it is being perceived, and to the issues that the hon. Member for North-East Derbyshire (Mr. Barnes) has just touched on about the post-conflict situation, because they are obviously at the top of our minds. I am sure that we shall have other opportunities to think about them before we go into the Easter recess, but this is a particularly good opportunity to consider in more general terms and over a longer time scale the lessons that we need to learn. I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman not only for giving us a guide to the contents of the book "Iraq: a Report from the Inside", but for giving us some very clear guidance about the issues that we need to address.
I was particularly struck by the hon. Gentleman's reference to the need for our response to terrorism to be intelligence led. That is a much wider issue than that of what happens in Iraq over the next few weeks, because it will affect the next few years. Indeed, colleagues might have heard a discussion on the "Today" programme this morning about the difficulties not only of peacemaking but of peacekeeping after hostilities, in which comparisons were made with the Balkans.
I was also struck by the erudite contribution by the hon. and learned Member for Dudley, North (Ross Cranston) about the Geneva conventions and, indeed, the other international conventions. I hope that he is right in saying that, as soon as the hostilities are over,
the United States Government will be faced with a challenge that what would seem to many of us to involve double standards, in terms of those who are imprisoned in Cuba with very limited rights. I fear, however, that I do not entirely follow him in terms of the problems facing manufacturing industry, not because I do not agree with him that such problems exist—clearly, they do—but because I find it extraordinary that he could deal with them without any reference to the difficulties that manufacturing industry faces in terms of exporting to euroland. Those difficulties have been reduced somewhat by the reduced discrepancy between the currency valuations, but they are still there, and manufacturers in Cornwall are facing a considerable uphill struggle, in common with agriculture, fishing and the tourist industry.I share the hon. and learned Gentleman's concern about the way in which we deal with very detailed issues of tax law. I served on the Standing Committee for a Finance Bill one year and, frankly it was a terrible experience for me—not just because I was so ignorant but because I felt no wiser by the end of it. I did not feel that, collectively, we had done a good job, and I think that the hon. and learned Gentleman is right to have concerns about those matters.
I take issue with the hon. and learned Gentleman's comments about the reform of the House of Lords, which I thought were extraordinarily timid. I assume that he was a member of the party that signed up to a manifesto that wished to make the second Chamber more effective and democratic. Frankly, it is not going to go that way if the Lord Chancellor and the Prime Minister are allowed to dominate the further discussion. I do not think that I would be breaking any confidences of the Joint Committee on House of Lords Reform if I said that, so far as I am aware, the hon. and learned Gentleman's view is not accepted or endorsed by anybody on that Committee from either House or any party. We must move on, for the very good reason that was often articulated here on a Thursday afternoon by the former Leader of the House, which is that good government depends on good parliamentary scrutiny. We are clearly not getting that, collectively, from the two Houses of Parliament working together. It is not a question of one House challenging the other. It is a question of both Houses working together to make Parliament more effective. I was particularly disappointed that a former Minister and a thoughtful Member of the House should take such a pessimistic, defeatist view.
I intervened on the hon. Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Mrs. Browning) about the surfacing of the A30 and I entirely agree with her. Of course, that is not the only section of the A30 that suffers from so-called whisper concrete. We also have it to the west of Exeter, around Oakhampton. I use that road twice a week on my way to and from Exeter station when I come to the House. I entirely endorse her view that, collectively, we should—I was going to say blackmail, but that would be an improper word to use—at least persuade the contractors to bring forward the dates for the improvement of that service. I am sure that she is right.
I return to the hon. Lady's point about the lessons of Afghanistan and, in particular, the role of the media. Recently, we have heard many quotations, some of them misquotations, from Aeschylus, who, I gather, wrote in the 5th century BC. He said:
- "In war, Truth is the first casualty".
Members may also have heard on this morning's "Today" programme a robust and persuasive defence of the integrity of those journalists by Robert Graham of the Daily Mail and the Evening Standard. Those journalists are incredibly courageous—they are taking their lives in their hands in Baghdad, and they are managing to report the situation as they see it in the most dangerous and difficult conditions.
Long ago, in one of my many failed previous careers, I was a journalist. I would not have dreamt of accepting an assignment to Baghdad in the current circumstances. We should be saluting the courage of those journalists, not in any way decrying their commitment to good journalism. Indeed, several highly respected journalists have already lost their lives in Iraq, so I find it difficult to accept the criticisms that have been made.
What did the Home Secretary say? He said:
- "For the first time in our history we not only have thousands of journalists with our troops but we have broadcast media behind what we would describe as enemy lines, reporting blow-by-blow what is happening."
It does not help that the Home Secretary, while complaining about spin, appears to be spinning himself. None of us can trust anything that the Saddam regime tells us. We know that, and most of the Arab world knows it. It also knows that his media machine is very suspect. Perhaps even more significant than the Home Secretary's comments on the messengers and their message is the fact that the al-Jazeera network has suspended broadcasts from Iraq today. Why? Because its editor refused to continue to broadcast after the Saddam regime expelled two of his journalists. We should recognise that, rather than simply make attacks.
As our troops are putting their lives on the line to create a more open, more democratic and free Iraq, I believe that they are entitled to expect higher standards from western politicians than the world has seen from Saddam. Our public are entitled to that as well. For example, we still do not know whether there was a
substantial public uprising in Basra. The media teams on our side suggested at the time that there was and that it had been ruthlessly put down. Surely we should know by now. If we do know, we and the public are entitled to hear about it. Similarly, we were told by the US and UK authorities that a chemical warfare factory had been discovered, but everything then went quiet. Was there one or was there not? Have the media been told to shut up or was the claim, by any chance, an overexcited bit of spin—a false report?We should bear it mind that our own Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary have repeatedly emphasised disarmament and the so-called weapons of mass destruction as the rationale for our participation in the war, and that Ministers here have refused to accept the Bush doctrine of regime change as sufficient justification. The media have yet to tell us whether stocks of any such weapons have been found. Given the proportion of the Iraqi land mass that has been liberated, one would expect some evidence to have been discovered.
Of course, I accept that even very small amounts of biological or chemical ingredients could be absolutely devastating, although I accept also that those would not be easy to find, but one would have expected some disclosure or some hints by now. If the US intelligence services knew where they were stored, surely they would have tipped off the UN inspectorate years ago.
Reference was made to that issue during the exchanges earlier between the Secretary of State for Defence and my hon. Friend the Member for Hereford (Mr. Keetch). There is at least a mystery here. I do not think it sufficient just to refer to protective equipment, because that in itself does not prove the existence of an horrendous arsenal, which is what the Prime Minister, the Foreign Secretary and other Ministers told us was there. Is something being kept from us? The media have a role to play in trying to establish that, and we should not simply accept assurances from our own press and spin doctors.
There was also the curious incident, which, as I saw it, went largely unreported, of the camp found in northern Iraq that belonged to a group linked to al-Qaeda. That group, however, was specifically anti-Saddam, which suggests that it and its links to al-Qaeda were not sufficient justification for the war. If anything, they were to the contrary.
By contrast with the complaints made by the Home Secretary in the US last night, my main complaint about the media involves excessive intrusion and excessive coverage. I echo the point made by the hon. Member for Tiverton and Honiton: there have been too many obsessively close-up and graphic reports of action and fatalities for my taste. Certainly, there have been unpleasant examples of "doorstepping" of the wives, parents or families of those who have lost their lives on our behalf, almost as soon as they have been officially informed of the loss of life. I find that very difficult to take.
Also, I find it hard to believe that the extraordinary scale and tone of the coverage is necessary, desirable or helpful to the families who are directly involved. In the first few days of the hostilities, taking a cue from the American media, there was a tendency to make it all look like a computer game—a casualty-free, remote,
electronic playground—which could keep everybody cheerfully gung-ho for a few days before normality was restored. Tragically, we have all learned that no wars are like that, and certainly this war is not like that. The hon. Member for Tiverton and Honiton referred to another aspect of what has been happening: so much detail is given that assistance could be given to the enemy forces and their intelligence services.I also find the falsification of photographs difficult to take. An example of that was given in the media this morning after a photographer had clearly falsified a photograph, obviously with the intention of making it more dramatic. Even now, the paper mills are struggling to produce enough newsprint to supply the apparently insatiable and ghoulish appetite of the editors. I wonder who reads and watches all this. Who manages to watch the interminable TV punditry?
What about the compulsory spin? It is surely significant that every single one of Rupert Murdoch's more than 100 newspaper editors all over the world vigorously supported the American justification for a pre-emptive strike against Iraq, whether the local population were doubtful, enthusiastic or antagonistic to hostilities. What an amazing coincidence.
I have been a working journalist, and I know many print and broadcast journalists who share those concerns, but their anxieties seem to have been overruled by the decision makers at the top. It is as if the media moguls had invested so much in the operation that they were determined to legitimise it and then to extract their full money's worth from it. I consider both aims deplorable.
We need not subscribe to the suspicion of conspiracy, so dreadfully fuelled by the notorious Jo Moore e-mail of 11 September, to worry about what is happening behind the scenes. The fog of war lies low over domestic politics too, as was revealed this morning by the results of an excellent survey reported in The Independent.
The Minister may laugh, but I do not think this is funny, and I do not think viewers and readers find it funny. They expect high standards of journalism from Britain. That is one reason, no doubt, why the Minister would accept that we must defeat the dictatorial attitude of the Saddam regime.
| Next Section
| Index | Home Page |